Having a hard time convincing your coauthors to learn LaTeX? With our Rich Text mode you no longer need to...

This weekend has seen the release of a major upgrade to the writeLaTeX editor, including a new user interface, an updated project pane to manage your files, and the first release of our new Rich Text mode for easier editing and collaboration.

Our new rich text mode renders headings, formatting and equations directly in the editor, to make it seem more familiar to WYSIWYG users.

This isn't simply of benefit to an individual author - collaboration has now suddenly become much easier, as Jacob Scott sums up nicely in this paragraph from his recent blog post:

No longer will I have to give the link to a document to my biological/clinical collaborator with the caveat 'just ignore everything that isn't text - squint a bit if you have to'. Now, they can just go ahead and edit away just like they are in word or whatever, but I can come in behind and have the full functionality of LaTeX.

So if you're having a hard time convincing your coauthors to use LaTeX, you no longer need to!

This is fully integrated with our existing service which automatically compiles your document in the background, so you can see how the final typeset document will look whilst you're writing (as seen on the right in the screenshot above).

Why have we added a Rich Text mode? By combining an easy-to-use editor with publication-ready output, we're making tools for scientific publishing accessible to more people, and helping to make it quicker and easier to write and publish your work online.

At the publishing end, once your work is complete you can use our integrated submission system to publish your work immediately, either in our gallery or with one of our open access partners such as figshare or F1000Research. We'll be adding more journals and publishers in 2014, and would love to hear from you if you'd like to start receiving submissions from writeLaTeX.

We'll also be adding a lot more features to the Rich Text mode over the coming weeks, and here's a short video demo of what's next:

As our Rich Text mode is still in development, we'd really appreciate your feedback; create a new document today and let us know what you think.