Still writing your own documents? That’s so 3200 BCE! At Authorea, we take digital publishing so seriously, we want to WRITE YOUR PAPER FOR YOU! Partnering with SCIGEN (who we briefly profiled last week), writing, submitting and disseminating your research will never again require a keyboard. Scholarly research and writing have never been easier. By stitching together a home-brewed soup of technical lingo, a cursory glance at your paper will yield resounding “Oh, hum, yes?”s — we guarantee! Concerned your manuscript won’t get accepted for publication? SCIgen has a proven record that _many_ of their randomly generated manuscripts have made it in to “peer reviewed” journals. And don’t worry, this is only horrifying if you aren’t in on it! Best of all, you can use a private article on Authorea to keep unwanted questions and comments out of the equation. Open and honest peer review is after all too dangerous an experiment, when we have venues ready and capable of accepting your SCIgen derived piece of utter genius. Happy Writing! ;)

WELCOME TO THE PITCHFORK PARTY This post comes in the context of a series of healthy discussion pieces on authoring scientific content for the web:[1] - LaTeX was not built for the Web by Alberto and Nate from Authorea. - LaTeX Something Something Darkside by Peter Krautzberger from MathJaX. - A Scholarly MarkDown discussion on Hacker News (see the comments) In this text, I will try to elaborate on the merits and deficiencies of using a pre-web authoring syntax, LaTeX, for writing modern publications in 2015 as active web documents. My stance is evolutionary – we should adapt our existing tools to the new environment and in the process gain insights for what the next generation of tools ought to be. If you are a working scientist who authors in LaTeX, I will suggest how to gradually adapt your existing toolchain, while making your first steps towards the future of publishing. If you don’t find the technical details interesting, you can skip to my suggestion in Section [sec:conclusion]. If you are a developer, I will argue with you that the next generation has not fully arrived yet. We’re not going to start a fire Feelings can burn strong when the words “LaTeX” and “Web” appear together. Debates over tool superiority, especially when online, tend to quickly become heated and destructive. My best guess is that the personal experiences with our tools over time evolve into full-blown relationships, with all associated pros and cons of that status. Maybe you truly love your tool, and that is great, please go ahead and nourish that feeling. Meanwhile, I will step back into more abstract territory and try to poke some applications with a stick and see when they bite. You’re welcome to tag along, but there’s no need for extra venom. [1] The author has his own torch in hand: I am a core contributor to LaTeXML and an enthusiastic developer at Authorea. So keep that bias in mind while reading on.

I work at a startup. We get things done on a budget. This is a summary of how I got: - A new test server for my local dev machine - An extra monitor for my dev setup - Tons of FUN! And all for less than $100.