Welcome to SwiftLaTeX

What is SwiftLaTeX?

SwiftLaTeX is a Web-browser based editor to create PDF documents such as reports, term projects, slide decks, in the typesetting system LaTeX. In contrast to other web-based editors SwiftLaTeX is true WYSIWYG, What-you-see-is-what-you-get: You edit directly in a representation of the print output. You can import a LaTeX document at any stage of completeness into SwiftLaTeX. You can start a new document with SwiftLaTeX, or you can use SwiftLaTeX for final copy-editing. For advanced operation you can edit the so-called LaTeX source code, which gives you more fine-grained control. SwiftLaTeX is collaborative; you can share your project with others and work on it at the same time. SwiftLaTeX stores your data in the cloud under your account; currently it supports Google Drive and DropBox.

What is the motivation of SwiftLaTeX

To bring true What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing to LaTeX. It is the most intuitive way of editing, where you click into a print-ready document and make the change you intend to do, and it is print-ready again. The true WYSIWYG feature of SwiftLaTeX is defined in our paper:

Elliott Wen and Gerald Weber. 2018. SwiftLaTeX: Exploring Web-based True WYSIWYG Editing for Digital Publishing. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2018 (DocEng '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 8, 10 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3209280.3209522 (Student Best Paper Award at DocEng 2018).

What data does SwiftLaTeX keep about me?

The SwiftLaTeX Web client communicates only with the SwiftLaTeX server to set up your access token to Google and to start up. The server never learns anything about the projects you are doing. Not the number, not the name, not the content. We only do basic analytics that comes inbuilt with the webserver.

Google Drive Permission

Google offers only specific levels of permission requests. SwiftLaTeX is designed to only access top-level directories "\swiftlatex_*" in your drive or shared with you, and make sure you have at any time full access to your projects in Google drive. Unfortunately the only permission level with Google which allows us to do this is the level that you will be asked for, which permits access to all files. We cannot restrict the level of permission. If you have concerns with this, we recommend you to create a dedicated account for your use of SwiftLaTeX and share your projects with your other Google accounts. We also cannot request different levels of access for different purposes. Google allows an app such as SwiftLaTeX only to have one level of permission.

Known Issues

More issues can be found in our bug tracker. https://github.com/SwiftLaTeX/BugTracker/

Lack of Unicode Support

Currently, our TeX engine lacks the international character support (i.e., UTF8). We are working hard to bring this feature up in the next version.

Uploading to Google is Pretty Slow

Our system abstracts your cloud stroage as a tranditional file system to simplify user interface implementation at the cost of a liitle bit performance. We are working hard to improve our implementation to reduce the network turn around time.

Cursor sometimes jumps around?

This may be a bug in our Javascript code base, we are currently doing the debug, and hopefully we will mitgate it in the next release.

Some documents do not compile?

Our engine enables fast compilation by using a technology called checkpointing. This technologies reduces the repeated computation by may lead to some minor bugs. Let us know the TeX template you are working with, we will have a look into it.