Documents Live, a web authoring and publishing system
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Table of contents
First published on Thursday, Feb 27, 2025 and last modified on Wednesday, May 27, 2026 by François Chaplais.
To create or update a discussion, click on the "Discussion" tab in the right sidebar. Here is a screenshot.
Discussions are visible to everyone by default. Access permissions to the discussions are the same as the document access permissions.
Underneath, a discussion is just a Documents Live document with a dedicated interface.
You can do four things in a discussion :
- create a post topic at the top level
- reply to a post
- edit a post if you are the author of the post, or the owner of a document
- delete a post if you are the author of the post, or the owner of a document. Deleting a post will delete all of its children.
When you create or edit a post, you are presented with a LaTeX code editor that lets you specify the title and content of the post.
Since the post is actually Documents Live content, you can post pretty much anything that you can write in Documents Live. The only commands that you cannot use are the sectioning commands, because the discussion sectioning define the position of each post.
You may want to refer to some content that has been published. Instead of manually entering the LaTeX code, you can refer to it. When you are editing a post, clicking anywhere in the document itself gives you the ability to put its label (or a generalized version of it) into the clipboard. After that, use the \ref command in your post code with the corresponding label, and the reference will work as if it were in the document itself. This is how, for instance, you can discuss an equation without writing the code for it.