About Us

Hi, thanks for being interested in ScribTeX. I won't bore you with a list of all the wonderful things ScribTeX can do (you can find that on the home page of the site) but instead I'll give you a quick run through the history of ScribTeX and what drives the inovation behind it.

I think we can all agree that LaTeX is a fantastic technology. It's been around in one form or another since the 1980s and it's seeing innovation every year. However, the way we use it hasn't changed at nearly the rate of other programs. Running it from the command line feels outdated and in this world of Web 2.0, dynamic content and web apps I think that we need to consider new ways of working with it. The overarching goal of ScribTeX is to bring LaTeX online and in doing so help to uncover ways we can improve the LaTeX experience.

The most obvious benefit is how easy collaboration is online. When you can store and work on your project in a central location which can be accessed from anywhere in the world, it becomes natural to start giving other people access to exactly the same project. Gone are the days of emailing around changes and hoping that everyone has the latest version.

It hasn't been an easy road to discover the best way to do things, and ScribTeX is the result of many hours of work with constant feedback from users. Of course the process of improving ScribTeX is a constant one that is going on everyday. The core idea started as a way to create a mathematics wiki with real LaTeX support, but once I had a working implementation of LaTeX online, I realised that the possibilities were much further reaching than that. This was something people could use as a great personal tool.

ScribTeX is seeing a nice steady growth at the moment and I'm still discovering the best ways to support that growth. At the moment you can subscribe to a paid account with increased features. This has been providing a reasonable revenue that will feedback into improving the site, but whether this is the best way to continue to grow and support ScribTeX is an exciting question that I look forward to finding out the answer to.

There is plenty more to say about ScribTeX and the variety of features it offers, but I'll let you discover those for yourself. It's enough to say that I'm excited by how far ScribTeX has come in the past few years, and I'm even more excited by where it will go in the future.

-- James, ScribTeX founder and director.