Announcements

Make LaTeX a first class citizen!

Level 2

Related to

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-Paper/Latex-equation-line-breaks/m-p/271650#M2587

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-Paper/Newline-within-Latex-Katex-editing-mode/m-p/276551#M27...

I've been using sharelatex/overleaf for a few years to collaboratively write LaTeX documents, and the workflow is really slow (make a change, "recompile" for a few seconds to render the document, manually scroll to the page you care about each time, repeat). I just started using Paper recently, and I'm amazed how much more productive I am when using it. When I saw that Paper supported LaTeX, I was ready to abandon sharelatex/overleaf immediately, but there is still a major impediment that gives me pause:

No support multiline LaTeX statements. The requirement that everything has to be on one line is practically a deal breaker. Equations need the ability to contain newlines for readability and supporting naturally multiline environments like \begin{align*}. Even worse, I cannot scroll to the left or right when editing a long line of LaTeX, making it totally unusable. There are other ideas that describe this problem and are marked "Solved", but this issue is NOT solved. They have found inelegant hacks to work around this fundamental flaw.

I understand that the automatic press-enter-to-render LaTeX is convenient, but if it procludes the use of actually supporting realistic LaTeX use, it needs to change.

In Jupyter and Mathematica notebooks, they address this problem by making Enter still insert a newline character within a cell, but Shift+Enter actually executes (in this case, renders) the contents of the cell.

Example:

If I want to input a small 4x4 matrix

It takes me to this, where I can't even see all the LaTeX. I'm not even allowed to scroll!

Tags (2)