Nice little project btw. - Online Latex is IMO a not yet solved problem, however others have a big head start and I imagine the whole thing gets complex very quickly - especially considering LaTex build times. If you want to offer the full functionality with all packages and everything, your service basically becomes a PaaS and you'll have to charge for access. Yet this is something that quite a few people could be interested in, since getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today. The problem with the business model is that it's really hard to try to charge money to academia, especially for things that are basically non-essential, even if they improve productivity.
Btw. if you still want to go that route, I'd look into Docker. Basically you can give every paying user an isolated container where he's running his jobs. This has quite a few advantages:
- more secure, since processes are isolated.
- easily scalable, especially with their hipache router in front of it. Each process sees the same port internally, Docker manages the mapping from global ports to local ones, hipache manages failover / load balancing.
- easy to separate into base functionality / pro packages for your business model - have a base image and an extended one with all the packages.
SageMathCloud (https://cloud.sagemath.com) provides a LaTeX editor "with all packages and everything", coupled with a full Linux shell, 5GB disk space, and 100% customizable compilation process.
"you'll have to charge for access" -- I do not charge for access, though the whole site does cost a lot behind the scenes; it's just that you're not the one who has to pay (Disclaimer: I'm the founder.) Anyway, I hope you'll try it out and complain (email me at wstein@uw.edu and I can upgrade quotas on your project).
Also, SageMathCloud and IPython notebook both have similar functionality to the original posts site embedded in them. For example, here is the example of the OP but as a (public) Sage worksheet:
In SageMathCloud worksheets, when you render %md cells, it is done entirely client side (no roundtrip to server at all), so very fast. I'm not sure about IPython notebooks.
> getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today
People often say that. I find that assertion puzzling. I use LaTeX for hours everyday, so I think I exercise a lot of the functionality, but to install I just follow the brief directions on the TeX Live site (I don't use MiKTeX but I understand it to also install smoothly). Could I ask what part of the installation gives trouble?
When it comes to LaTex I decide the environment (OS / LaTeX distro) by which editor is supported. So far I still find 'Kile' the best editor by far. Which is why I have a Kubuntu VM just for that purpose. For the templates that I use there's a whole host of packages that I need - and the package names of course don't match in apt-get and in LaTex, so it basically becomes a 'guess what error message means which package is missing / try to google for all that' until everything runs. I don't know about you, but I don't call that smooth.
Personally, I just get everything. That is, I'd get the whole MacTeX distribution. Never need to worry too much then. (At least on Ubuntu, the stuff from apt-get is often years old, which doesn't matter sometimes, but does matter often enough to be annoying, in my experience.)
FWIW I like texworks and texstudio for "Visual" editing due to the side-by-side display of LaTeX and PDF (and using SyncTeX to jump between them).
Other than that I mostly use Vim to edit LaTeX.
I think texstudio is fairly similar to Kile you might want to give it a shot.
The biggest problem I usually have (on a Mac) isn't so much that it's difficult; it's that the MacTeX package is 2.4 GB, which often means an hour or so of waiting before I can actually do anything.
You can also add a few template document files, and maybe ads at the bottom to make some money off it because it can take off and your server may get a good hammering.
