Personally I would save a copy in a standard format and make it available on a domain I control. I've done that in the past for scientific publications.
Reminds me of Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiments: "Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping. They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All appeared [outwardly] as a beautiful exhibit of the species with keen, alert eyes and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact, very stupid."
Like many psychology and sociology papers, Mouse Utopia is now discredited because nobody could reproduce those results: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
"Kessler 1966 only somewhat resembles Calhoun’s results: while Kessler does describe deviant mice behavior driven by density (such as homosexual matings) and high infant mortality/cannibalism, on the other hand, there are no population crashes or cessation of reproduction but stable populations after initial growth, there are no behavioral sinks, any ‘beautiful ones’ or ‘drinkers’ or ‘autistic’ mice are not described as such by Kessler, the mice are healthy overall, and transplanted mice revert"
I wonder if this is in response to a sudden surge in revenue following the previous announcement. I bought >$100 in Vita games and I'm sure many others started stocking up too. Whatever the reason, it's good news we have a year or two more!
Hey! I must confess I haven't actually read those myself, although I did recently buy Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitive Information", on which the Tufte class is based I believe. If you eventually get into typography in general, I can't recommend "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst enough. It's rightly called the typographer's bible.
The typesetting service sprang from the modest success of LaTeX Templates. The large number of visitors meant that I had a constant stream of questions from individuals and businesses asking about modifying templates to include/change this or that. I did the whole free support thing for 1 or 2 years, but eventually realized it's a never-ending thankless task and I may as well try to capitalize on this desire that people have. Like with Creodocs, I had no idea whether anyone would pay me for this. The number of existing services was very small. I made the site and linked to it from LaTeX Templates, which is the perfect place to advertise, and eventually I started to get a trickle of clients. My rate initially was something like $30USD/hour, which was an insanely large amount for a poor PhD student, and I even remember a client saying I was way undercharging for the quality of work! As I've had more and more clients, I've built up the Showcase page to show off what the service is capable of, and I believe this is an important draw to give legitimacy to the service and show what LaTeX itself is capable of. I haven't asked, but I imagine most of my clients come from LaTeX Templates so the key for me has been to provide something for free and then upsell to a paid service. Nothing new there :)
Sorry for the slow reply! That's interesting. Your public template works fed into a stream of clients. I guess what i'm curious about is who out there is willing to pay for a LaTeX template, or typsetting? Is it one-off academics working in STEM fields? Journals? Have you had much luck getting customers from outside of such areas? Businesses looking for slick invoices or brochures? Non STEM-publishers? I've got quite a lot of questions and ideas up this area - how would you feel about a chat?
Also great call about The Elements of Typographic Style. I'll add it to my todo list. Tufte - hmm yes classic text for sure... should probably get a copy too. So much to read!
Now I'm sorry for the slow reply! It started as individuals and academics, I was typesetting CVs and papers, but as time went on I have had more and more businesses as clients. Now it's about 80% businesses/institutions. I think a big part of that is the Showcase which shows some of my past clients who agreed for me to show the work I did for them publicly. It's a relatively large list now and clearly shows big and small companies from all over the world and gives confidence in the service. At least, that's what I assume, I don't bug my clients for how or why they went with the service. Happy to talk more, just send through an email to the address listed on the site at the bottom!
I know one image is a bit cropped on the home page on mobile, but apart from that everything works as intended on my iPhone 11. I'm using Safari though. What bugs did you encounter?
I'll be adding a demo, a few others also commented on that. Yes, essentially you can fill out HTML forms for defined variables in LaTeX templates and get back compiled PDFs.
I really appreciate you trying it out and giving your feedback, thanks!
The lack of a preview and wasted credits on mistakes is something I'd like to improve in the medium term. The way it is now, content is completely separated from presentation, and I consider that a defining feature of the product. Of course, producing each document costs essentially nothing, and the lack of a preview may be very frustrating, so perhaps meeting somewhere in the middle in terms of a preview may be the way to go.
Your alternative models are excellent ideas and I will consider them as part of an overhaul of the pricing model, thanks!
The rendering happens in Docker on worker instances, but a pentest is something I will look to get as well. Disallowing things like including arbitrary files from the operating system in the LaTeX code is important, I agree.
