Comments on: A vision for collaborative mathematics platforms

By: James Allen

James Allen — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:11:45 +0000

Hi, I’ve been wishing for some sort of online LaTeX collaboration for a long time as well, so I ended creating a website to try provide some of the features you mention. It started out mostly for myself, but now I’m hoping other people might find it useful. The site is http://www.scribtex.com and it renders LaTeX, has a revisions system and provides comprehensive access control. I’m hoping to add bibtex support in the near future.

By: Dan Drake

Dan Drake — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:58:03 +0000

This sounds like a great idea. I’ve often felt that mathematicians are kinda behind the curve with respect to good use of computers and the internet — the arXiv was started by physicists; darcs, with its “theory of patches” and “patch commutators”, was started by a physicist…guys, we’re getting pwned by physicists!

Speaking of physicists, this site would be very useful to them, as well as computer science people, and anyone who needs good collaboration with LaTeX documents. The potential audience, I think, is pretty big.

By: Nathaniel Dean

Nathaniel Dean — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:02:38 +0000

It’d be really cool if you could integrate Coq or other proof verification tools into the setup. That way you could even run “unit tests” on your paper for a sanity check.

By: Michi

Michi — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:47:23 +0000

Ben: As you might have noticed above, I draw my inspiration solidly from the programming project sites – such as SourceForge, Rubyforge, assembla, ….

Thing is, these don’t have LaTeX support. The non-plus-ultra of mathematical collaboration. They also aim programmers, not mathematicians. Which is why I think that we need a site for our needs.

By: Ben Webster

Ben Webster — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:39:59 +0000

You should look into some of these sites set up for programming projects. At the moment, I’m trying out assembla, which has a lot of the features you want (Subversion, Trac, wiki), though obviously not so much the LaTeX support.

By: Nathan Dunfield

Nathan Dunfield — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:04:48 +0000

A possible key to making such an effort successful would be to have a clean, easy to use, web interface for as many of the components as possible, tied together into a single package. For instance, combining your first and fourth points, there should be a webform where one or two clicks gives you a PDF of any version of the paper in the control system or a latexdiff between any two versions. (Of course robustness when LaTeXing things may be a fatal problem for this idea; a place to start would be the arXiv autotex script.) Another possible component would be a virtual whiteboard server. Oh, and "1-click" arXiv submission. A smaller scale starting point than the ideal of a single large university-backed server would be to create a virtual machine for Xen or VMWare that individual departments could drop into place. Something like this or thatbut with all the features you're suggesting.

By: Joachim Breitner

Joachim Breitner — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:28:02 +0000

Hi,

for some fellow students and me I developed latexki[1], a wiki for LaTeX documents (and a few feature-limited regular wiki pages) that allows online-editing the source, stores the files in a SVN repository which can also be used directly by regular contributors and has some features such as first-page-preview on the website and dependency tracking. It’s written in haskell, and you can see it live on the mitschriebwiki[2], german only though.

There is no access control of any kind via the web interface, and svn access is handed out personally, so it’s not yet what you want – but quite close, isn’t it?

Greetings,
Joachim

[1] http://latexki.nomeata.de/
[2] http://mitschriebwiki.nomeata.de/

By: Roman Cheplyaka

Roman Cheplyaka — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:39:31 +0000

Interesting topic. I've collected some my thoughts here (in Russian, sorry), they are primarily about wiki vs version control system for writing papers, but there are few useful (English) links at the bottom of that page. I'm not able to be the main developer of such system, but I'd definitely like to join if someone will be gathering a team.