Alternatives
Products that do what I brought the benefits of LaTeX to non technical users does
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Oct 2025 · monsterwriter.com
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Hello HN, in 2017 I started a project that would become MonsterWriter. First envisioned as a semi-structured wiki it became a writing application specialized for scientific content. It is a perfect tool if you write your thesis. While it is focused on technical content, you can still see the knowledge management spirit in it. One or two years ago, my wife joined me in my efforts and redesigned the whole project and we recently released it as MonsterWriter2. To celebrate this milestone we are giving away free lifetime licenses for the Desktop version (till Apr 28). Just use the promo code…
2024
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During the hype of llama.ttf months ago, I was speculating the potential of WASM shaper for even crazier purpose, one that fitter to a font shaper's duty -- to synthesize font at runtime. This project as proof-of-concept implements a synthesizer that generates and rasterizes handwriting-style font, backed by a super-lightweight RNN model (~14MiB).
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, Since 2019, I’ve been working on a writing platform designed for creating complex documents (e.g., theses). I personally use it for everything as it also allows to classify documents in categories so you can organize them efficiently. As of a few months ago, the app is also available in the browser, and you can now invite coworkers to collaborate on a document in real time. The app is somewhat inspired by LyX. It offers an intuitive, modern editor, but users don’t need to know any LaTeX. When it’s time to export, they can choose from a range of templates (IEEE paper, thesis, etc.). A…
2025
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2015 · mrzool.cc
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Jul 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, I'm a film director by trade, and I prefer writing my stories in plain text rather than using clunky screenplay software. Standard markup like Fountain doesn't work for me because I write in mixed languages, so I use Markdown with a custom syntax I invented to resemble standard screenplay structures. This workflow is great until I need to actually generate an industry-standard screenplay PDF. I got tired of manually copying and pasting my text back into the clunky software just to export it, so I decided to write a script to automate the process. That's when I hit a wall. I tried…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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