Saturday, February 26, 2011

Online LaTeX Editors

Although my primary word processor is MS Word 2007 for class materials, I use LaTeX for assignments in my upper level courses. Many of the assignments I create are not too lengthy and so I started searching for a quick browser-based online LaTeX compiler. Here are three I am experimenting with. The first one is totally free. The other two offer a free limited version.
  • latexlab.org : works with your Google account sign-in, but it's not affiliated with Google. Advantage is that your tex files are in the Google docs folder. I found the previewer to be somewhat clunky and it seemed to run the slowest of the three I found. But it is free and has no restrictions.
  • scribtex : worked very quickly on my sample latex file and rendered a nice PDF file in a separate tab. The interface is very minimalist, though. The free account has restrictions, but will be fine for my use of creating assignments
  • verbosus: Has a nicer interface than scribtex, with the tex file and pdf file side by side, but a lot of the window's real estate was taken up with file and project windows. Maybe there is a way to customize it, but I didn't check it out. The free account has restrictions as well.
 I think I'll work with latexlabs and scribtex for now. But I thought verbosus was worth checking out.