I've known about Overleaf for almost as long as I've used LaTeX and until about two years ago, I didn't really understand the point of it; it's not like LaTeX is hard to install or anything, what's the advantage of a web service?
It wasn't until I started doing my PhD work where I realized the Overleaf is useful, because the collaborative tools are extremely handy. LaTeX is very popular in the academic world, and Overleaf allows me to easily work on papers with my advisors (who live in a different continent). It's been great.
I do wish they'd add Pandoc support; LaTeX is cool but I find Markdown considerably more pleasant about 95% of the time, so it'd be great if they could let us use that, though I realize this is probably easier said than done.
KeenWrite doesn't have a LaTeX integration. Instead, KeenWrite integrates KeenType[1], which is a plain TeX implementation based on NTS[2]. By offering only plain TeX, KeenWrite is technically compatible with either ConTeXt or LaTeX. At time of writing, KeenWrite interoperates with ConTeXt because ConTeXt makes a far superior split between presentation logic and content. KeenWrite can perform the following document conversions:
I mean, by "not that hard", I guess I meant "not that hard for me"; `nix-shell -p texliveFull` or whatever your preferred distro's install command.
While that requires a certain level of geekiness, I am pretty sure I could still walk my parents through installing it on Windows and get them using TeXStudio or something, so it's not insurmountable. LaTeX itself sort of inherently requires a willingness to do thing in the initially-less-easy way.
That said, yeah a web service is of course much more approachable. If my parents wanted to use LaTeX I would probably just point them to Overleaf.
The installation and first five minutes of any kind of product is hugely make or break. I keep my resume in LaTeX via Overleaf, but probably wouldn’t bother with it if I had to get LaTeX running locally, which has always seemed fairly complex to me (though I’m admittedly no LaTeX has expert and may entirely be wrong).
This surprises me. On most platforms it’s just a package download and install. On Mac, it’s macTeX. On Linux, it’s whatever your distro calls texlive via the package manager. On windows it’s mikTeX. That’s not exactly complex or requiring any sort of latex expertise. Linux can be the one that requires the most thinking if they don’t have one package that pulls in all of what you need, but I can’t remember it being more than a couple minutes of effort last time I did it on Ubuntu or fedora.
The difficulty is getting multiple collaborators to install and pin the same packages, where everyone might be using a different platform/distro.
Example: I might commit a change that compiles perfectly fine with my version of asmath, but it conflicts with the version of asmath in the style guide of some UC Berkeley department/lab.
It requires choices and knowing what to install and if things don’t work, troubleshooting the install can be difficult. For a first time task of “install latex”, it’s not the easiest. Especially for newer users. I e done it half a dozen times and I’m still not quite sure if I’ve done it right on my Mac (right away).
I wasn’t aware of a brew package; I will definitely check that out. I have always been using the texlive installer for macOS (MacTeX), which is very easy to use. Although the install instructions can be a bit long and important to read when Apple breaks things.
Is 10 gigs really that much nowadays? I have to think that if you're frequenting HN you're likely to have at least a terabyte in storage on your personal computer?
It’s not about the HN visitor… it’s about the collaborator or grad student who might be on an entry level computer with 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The entire system needs to be easy for them to install and maintain. And even if I have 1TB of storage, if I could avoid an extra 10GB of space in my backups, I’d appreciate it.
The fact that you don't seem to realize that downloading 10GB of stuff just to edit/generate PDF documents is completely bonkers just shows how out of touch Latex afficionados are.
As far as I'm concerned, the outputs are pretty good but until somehow really makes no-nonsense software that can do that in an efficient manner, it might as well not exist at all.
Fair enough. I just have a Nix Flake to handle this stuff for me now so I just do `nix build`, but obviously that's getting into territory that is super geeky.
I tried to "install LaTeX" on Mac. I installed latex2html with Brew, and passed it an example .tex. I got `Fatal (syswait): exec " ./images.tex" failed: Permission denied`
I tried to install `texlive` (at your recommendation) also through brew, and got the error `Could not symlink bin/afm2tfm.Target /usr/local/bin/afm2tfm already exists.`
I think you should use what you like and if you like Overleaf then by all means use it.
That being said, I think the package you want is macTex, installable via `brew install --cask mactex`. As stated in the previous post, it's also pretty easy to get it working with Nix, even on macOS (which is my primary OS until T2 Linux becomes actually usable).
I usually use overleaf because I need collaboration. Getting your parents onto collaborative LaTeX is harder, particularly because the continual recompiling of PDFs tends to upset things like OneDrive and Dropbox if two people are editing and syncing at once.
While it has lot of functionality you could use to write articles and stuff, it seems more similar to Markdown than Latex/Typst due to any functionality having to be hardcoded in the compiler.
LaTeX is _definitely_ more flexible than Quarto or... really anything else. Tools like Quarto will get you most of the way without such a steep learning curve.
Thankfully my PhD advisor is fine with just using Git for collaboration on papers. The collaboration features of git (change tracking, commit messages, etc.) are super convenient since I'm already using them for code. (Doesn't apply so much with overleaf git integration since the commits are not human generated.) And no need to have internet access whenever you work on it.
If Overleaf was closer to Google Docs, it would be an amazing product. I don't get why its team stopped developing, e.g., collaboration features (like mentioning others in comments and coloring changes by their author) and didn't integrate it with reference managers (Overleaf seems to only support BibTex references). It feels they stopped 10% shy of making Overleaf appealing to folks traditionally less comfortable with LaTeX (psychology, medicine, literature, etc.). I'd love to get my non-technical collaborators on Overleaf but they will not use it until Overleaf gets much polish.
Overleaf syncs quite well with Zotero. The only bummer is that it's not continuous but one person has to be "responsible" for the sync, but usually that works out fine.
With the notable difference that there is no magic ingredient to Overleaf.
If you have all the files you can recreate the documents with a local latex installation. Overleaf makes this easy, since you can sync it with github repos.
Good luck accessing/recreating a google docs document if google has an unexpected downtime or gets shut down eventually.
The best feature of Overleaf is that you can `git clone` projects and work on them locally (if you have premium). That way, you yourself can use e.g. Emacs to edit, your collaborators can use Overleaf in a browser if they wish, and it all syncs nicely.
Sounds great in principle. In practice, it's the stuff of nightmares. This is because the web version commits every keystroke of your online contributors, making it very difficult for you to actually merge your local commits (they need to stop typing!).
Yup. When I was using it, I don't think it was literally every keystroke but it was something pretty granular so that if your contributors were working on the document it was a nightmare to get anything pushed since it kept changing under your feet and causing conflicts. Finish a merge, and another one is waiting.
I was just about to comment something like: worked fine for me... But then I realised that the only time I did this I was 6+ timezones away from my collaborators.
I actually never experienced this issue, that sounds annoying. But most papers I work on have like 2 coauthors, where one of them is usually in a different time zone, so that might be why :)
To somewhat echo other comments here: users need to be very careful with the git syncing. It works most of the time when edits on git clones and edits on the web interface are being made at very separate times, and when nothing at all is done in git other than committing, pulling, and pushing (if I recall, even signing can break it). But amongst the people I know who have used Overleaf for important projects with collaborators, the git syncing has generally worked reasonably right up until it is needed the most: important, tricky changes; multiple authors meeting online and editing; oncoming deadlines for conference paper submissions resulting in many edits over a short time scale. In critical situations, it can often become unusably slow (potentially tens of minutes, to hours, to get a successful pull or push), or simply fail.
One group with a paid, group subscription asked support about the instability, and was simply told their use case was unusual (writing conference papers with some git and some web editors?). They are now planning on moving away from using it.
I actually didn't know that! I do have premium through my school so I will definitely try that out.
That said, I actually don't think the integrated Overleaf editor is bad. They have Vim keystroke support, so I can fairly easily use it without much trouble on my end.
The online editor is OK, I also use it (with Vim keybindings) sometimes for quick/minor edits.
I’m not comfortable using it for extended work though. I miss things like surround text objects for TeX environments and macros (provided by evil-tex or vimtex), ergonomic entry of equations (provided by CDLaTeX or by the vimtex insert-mode bindings), autoformatting (provided by latexindent), and some navigational abilities (e.g. being able to jump to the documentation of TeX packages with a single keybinding). On top of that, there’s the missing general editor plugins… And at least on MacOS, their PDF viewer is quite blurry compared to the native viewers :)
With that said, I think Overleaf is great, and it’s made LaTeX itself much more accessible for a wider audience. But for me, it pales in comparison to a local Emacs or Vim configuration…
It definitely happens if you’re writing in the same room with someone. I’ve done this with advisors or other students, not all the time but with enough regularity to make it relevant.
> it's not like LaTeX is hard to install or anything
It took me the better part of a day to set up all the dependencies to properly compile the thesis template my uni provides. Just the core and basic extensions are over a gigabyte to download, then I had to manually copy something from one folder to another, then run some obscure command to rebuild...something, then the version of biber didn't match the version of something else, but if I installer biber directly then it didn't match some other perl library, but I couldn't uninstall and replace that because it was required by some other perl program I have installed...
I might be going against the current here, but why Markdown?
Hardly anyone outside tech knows how to write using Markdown, and a rich text editor with good shortcuts will cater to both non-tech and tech audience.
All in all, I agree that writing in LaTex can be painful. I've wasted too many hours after having fallen into LaTex rabbit holes trying to fix obscure errors and weird rendering.
1) Markdown is considerably less verbose than LaTeX.
2) Not a fan of rich text. MS Word has kind of ruined it for me, every time I write something in MS Word there it feels like some funky invisible formatting ends up messing up my document. Markdown is still all plain text so weird formatting bugs won't sneak in and I can version control it trivially with Git.
3) LaTeX has some bullshit that consistently screws me up, like having to differentiate between forward quotes and backward quotes using backticks.
4) With the Pandoc flavor of Markdown it is easy to drop into LaTeX for equations, and I can also directly use BibTeX citations.
5) If I use Markdown, I can very easily get Pandoc to directly convert it to nearly any document format I want, and it does a very good job doing so, this includes LaTeX or XeLaTeX or ConTeXt if I want to render a PDF.
I don't hate LaTeX or anything, I just find Markdown more pleasant, and with Pandoc I can easily convert it to LaTeX later to render.
Yeah, as a supervisor for bachelor, master and PhD students there are some benefits; like I can go in and comment on their thesis report directly.
However, I feel it comes short is when there are several people working on a paper; at least I haven’t found a way to easily see my co-authors changes/diff. Hence, when I write papers with my students I prefer that we use GitHub directly. This makes it easy to split specific changes into commits and even use pull requests for larger edits. Of course, it requires some knowledge of git, but my students (should) have this knowledge being CS students :-)
I’m also not a fan of browser-based editors, but Overleaf’s editor has gotten a bit better since I first used it.
I also used Overleaf (and sharelatex before it) for most of my PhD and had no idea it was open source. That's awesome!
I randomly logged in to Overleaf the other day to make something quick in latex, and discovered that my dissertation would no longer compile. Since I'd graduated, I no longer had access to my school's account, and dissertations are so long they time out the build on the free plan.
That it's open source makes me feel better about ever being able to reproduce a build someday if I needed to. (As I write this, I realize I never will. But the it's the feeling that counts!)
I’m glad they changed the name. In high school I used to mention share latex as a good online compiler and people would always give me a weird look and believe it was a prank.
Overleaf's documentation is great for learning LaTeX, but I'd never realized the product itself was free software licensed under AGPLv3, so I thought this was worth posting!
Exactly. I had the same thought so I checked the website again and there is almost none to no mention of "open-source" or their GitHub repository link anywhere. Quite likely being done to drive more users to buy subscriptions instead of self-hosting it.
I started using LaTeX with Overleaf in college, and it quickly became a game-changer for me. From meticulously crafting lab reports to designing a Beamer slideshow for my senior capstone project, I spent countless hours on Overleaf, creating documents that I was genuinely proud of. The intuitive interface made the entire process not only efficient but also enjoyable. While I primarily use it for my CV now, I still appreciate the power and elegance of Overleaf every time I need to update my resume.
I loved to read this: “genuinely proud of”… as a professor I read a lot of thesis reports (bachelor and master) for grading them, and many of them can’t honestly be proud of their reports. I wish more students would be more curious to learn how to prepare nice looking documents.
I used to run LaTeX on my 3 machines, switching between them based on compute/portability of the machine, and used a git repo for syncing. So it doesn't give me something novel; but the convenience of overleaf has been amazing. Once you get used to the "write and forget" model, it's hard to go back (but still doable).
It especially shines when you have to collaborate. The convenience of small features also add up, such as being able to leave comments for your collaborators, clicking on the LaTeX document to have the PDF viewer scroll to the corresponding location, and vice-versa (doesn't work exactly the same way, but close), having a fast compile mode that keeps recompiling as you make changes (good for editing, distracting for writing, but ymmv), being able to click on the toc that is generated by overleaf in a side panel.
Maybe other tools do some of these things, but having all of them in place is nice.
The big hurdle now becomes that all collaborators now need to know emacs;-)
But good to know! Although I am curious as to how clicking on TeX leading to scrolling the PDF to the corresponding location in the PDF would work (and vice-versa). Also for collaboration (some of my collaborators are not in the same continent) I'm assuming you need to host an emacs server; where might one typically do this? Any cloud compute provider, e.g., Linode?
> The big hurdle now becomes that all collaborators now need to know emacs;-)
As God intended. ;)
They actually don't though, if they prefer to remain heathens see bottom of this reply.
> Although I am curious as to how clicking on TeX leading to scrolling the PDF to the corresponding location in the PDF would work (and vice-versa).
Could be wrong, but I think the synchtex files produced by builds are for that. I usually have the PDF open in one Emacs buffer (you can view pdfs in Emacs), and the TeX file open in another. Ctrl-left click in the PDF jumps to the spot in the text buffer for that spot in the PDF, and in the TeX buffer there is a keybinding to do the reverse. Probably a way to click and get there too, but I use the keybinding.
> I'm assuming you need to host an emacs server
No, Emacs runs locally and interfaces with the cloned git repo on your machine. Your collaborators could use Notepad for all Emacs cares, as long as they work in the same repo and push to the shared remote.
Wasn't aware of synchtex - read up on it a bit based on your comment, yes it looks like that might work, thanks!
For collaboration, I meant real-time collaboration, where you see your collaborator's cursor or changes while you are on the document yourself. Git push/pull probably won't suffice for that, but yes, while convenient, the larger question is if all projects even need that kind of collaboration.
A lot of our students use Overleaf, I’ve never seen the point; especially now that most of their thesis documents no longer compile on the free tier.
I suggested one my students simply install LaTeX and he went down some Docker rabbit hole a fellow class mate sent him. Students do love to over complicate things.
Docker sounds about right for Latex given its gazillion dependencies with multiple alternatives and choices for several of those. I haven't really needed or used it in many years but it always was a bit of a beast to install. Early Linux in the nineties of course came with convenient package management that somewhat hides this. But dealing with e.g. windows or mac setups exposes a bit more that it's quite a bit of cruft that is getting installed.
The macOS installer is very easy to use and you can even install a basic version that installs the main latex packages you need (91MB). If you need to install more than the basic ones there is a package manager UI for that (TeX Live utility). Of course I just install the full version and I have everything. It is 5.7GB download.
I prefer to run LaTeX locally, but when I need to write something with more people I use Overleaf, as it allow to edit collaboratively. They are not excluding as you can use Git to push and pull changes.
For my thesis I'm leveraging Overleaf's Lua compilation to automagically input all tex files in a given folder. It organizes them into chapters/sections/etc matching the folder hierarchy, sorting by leading indices in the folders' or files' name (eg "35 Topology.tex"). This allows me to split/collapse/reorder sections on a whim, keeping the table of contents in sync with the filesystem. I find it particularly useful as I'm developing a complex framework with yet unclear scope and internal logic. Btw, it supports commands (using ø) in the filesystem to write special characters in the titles.
If there's any interest I would like to share it, if only for the "import all files in folder" thing. But how should I go about sharing it? A Github repo? Or somewhere inside Overleaf?
Looking at the PR history, it's interesting how few PRs are being merged per year.
Of the ones that are they are very short, and typically buxfixes or changes to infrastructure rather than any new features.
I think I count 4 prs merged, with less than 20 lines of code altered, since 2022, and even going back until the beginning of the 2014 commit history, it's hard to find a PR that's altering core functionality.
Looking at the commits history[1], they are very probably using something else than (public) GitHub for many Pull Requests. On Friday, there were 7 pull requests merge and more commits referencing merge requests not available on GitHub.
I did a remote calc class and nerd sniped myself into learning latex via using overleaf to do homework instead of taking photos of handwritten stuff. 10/10, would self nerdsnipe again.
I started writing my resume in LaTeX years ago. There are a couple templates on Overleaf that are very similar, there seems to be a convergence on the standard "engineering resume".
I made https://resumai.co/convert to allow others to use the template. It works fairly well with most inputs. It's a free tool!
Overleaf is awesome. Honestly I thought that syncing with git would solve any problem with collaboration, like with coding. I was wrong. Overlead collaboration feature works so well. And the compilation is fast too.
I never know they have open source though. I seriously did a google search "overleaf alternative self host" last month and didn't realize this.
Wrote my dissertation in grad school using Overleaf. I’d their UI was more refined than ShareLatex. This was back in 2015-16
It’s interesting to see that they are still around. I remember in one of my tickets, one of the front desk ticket personnel had a PhD herself and was very quick to narrow down the code within SVG file causing rendering issues!
I use LyX a lot and found it very pleasant to type latex without having to remember all Latex commands. It's especially good when typing formulas (I have to remember shortcuts though, but it's much easier).
Been using this for over a decade, back when it was called sharelatex. Always liked it for the free cloud storage, nowadays mostly just use it when I need to update my resume.
(Just for completeness, ShareLaTex and Overleaf were two different products that merged, and the result was... surprisingly fine. It wasn't a rename as such.)
I've used Overleaf before the ShareLaTex merge strictly for the collaboration feature - setting up and using LaTeX on Ubuntu was easy enough, especially since pdflatex (just tex -> PDF, no more tex -> DVI -> PostScript -> PDF nonsense!) and me or a collaborator usually compiled the final PDF locally IIRC.
IMO basic Git + your text editor of choice is much better for academic collaboration. I use Vim for text editing and don't want to be forced into some web editing tool. Also, when I review student writing I want them to actually look at the edits I make and understand the reasoning behind them. Overleaf makes that harder. I know there is Git integration but last time I checked it was kind of clanky and also required the paid version.
For the reason behind edits, my collaborators and I profusely use the comments system in overleaf. This is not the same as a file diff that you might do with git, but we have got used to it now without any big changes to our larger workflow.
(Tangential to your specific point but relevant to many comments here: if your collaborators are not from CS or are not s/w savvy, using git directly is not an option for them. For people who want to just use LaTeX, Overleaf lowers the minimum skill requirement to just knowing LaTeX. This is a big benefit it brings to the table.)
I'm also a fan of git+text editor but I do miss the collaborative editing. In the final stage of writing a paper, I want to be able to sit on a video conference call and both people edit the document at the same time, without having to stop to push and pull every little edit.
Unfortunately, it seems that most collaborative editing tools are web or work on a client-server model where only the "server" has the actual files and can compile them to pdf. (The client can collaboratively edit raw latex but can't see the resulting pdf)
Overleaf supports a basic git push and pull setup. Everything on one branch, no staging, no commit messages on overleafs side. I've used it for pulling to a server and then having new Tex files migrated into wordpress. It worked pretty well for that.
Unfortunately basic experience with git at universities is not something you can expect. Especially professors cause a lot of damage frequently due to not taking/having the time to learn it properly.
Took us about three months to pick Overleaf, we went for it largely because it was a single word, hard to confuse/mispell when said aloud (unlike writeLaTeX), had a connection with writing "over the page", and probably must importantly, we could get the .com domain.
Can you explain this part? The sound of "Leaf" could be represented by any number of possible spellings, eg "leave", "lief", "leeve"... - not all are standard English words, but neither is "Overleaf", and exotic/made-up spelling would be just par for the course for a tech product with an exotic/made-up name.
I actually really liked the domain name writelatex.com, because it pretty much tells you what you can do and it's easy to remember, even if you haven't used it in a long time (which could easily happen for a product that gets used a lot in academia and much less outside, eg someone returning to school after a few years of work).
Ah yes, I missed some important context - one of the reasons for moving to a name without LaTeX in it was because we'd just released the first beta version of the visual editor (the rich text mode at the time), and the goal was to keep lowering the barriers to getting started with LaTeX, and to make collaboration easier for non-LaTeX users. And so Overleaf came from a search for a broader name than writeLaTeX.
That's an interesting point about the pronunciation - overleaf is a standard English word, and certainly seemed less confusing than writeLaTeX when said aloud, but I agree it's not perfect! Was the best we could find at the time (especially given the other needs mentioned above).
Is anyone self-hosting this on FreeBSD?
Would you share how you set it up?
I tried to understand how the docker setup works, but
found it to convoluted to replicate on FreeBSD.
There are a couple nice features about Overleaf, like collaborative editing, fairly quick turnaround rebuilding, and being able to double-click to jump back and forth between the PDF and the source. But being forced to edit text in a their crappy web interface just frankly sucks. It's like throwing away half my skillset. It'd be so much better to go the other way and add collaborative features to existing editors than to reinvent the wheel in a crappy way.
Didn’t they buy their open source competitor, Sharelatex, adopted the code only to cripple the free functionality like git support behind a paywall?
I may be wrong but I think they were proprietary before the acquisition.
Overleaf is an example of academics' Stockholm syndrome with respect to LaTeX. It's a not very good web-based text editor with none of the basic features you'd expect from your text editor. Think Notepad, but online. But these guys use LaTeX... they're not discriminating consumers. So then you get locked into it by your colleagues who have never used a decent text editor or IDE, and never thought "hmm, I wonder if it should take less than half an hour of fiddling with parameters to build a decent-looking table".
What do you propose as an alternative to LaTeX? Word?
I wouldn't recommend LaTeX to a casual user writing the occasional letter or memo, but if you're writing an academic paper with equations, figures, references, etc., then Word is a massive pain. Markup languages like LaTeX take some initial investment to learn, but at a certain level of complexity, they become less of a pain than a WYSIWYG editor like Word.
As for your comparison to Notepad, I wasn't aware that Notepad allowed simultaneous, collaborative editing by multiple online users, revision tracking, continuous compilation of markup to PDF, and jumping between the same location in the markup and compiled PDF. Notepad must have come a long way since the last time I used it.
There is some exaggeration in my "Notepad", but the fact is, Overleaf lacks many features of a decent modern text editor, starting with a decent menu bar, all wrapped in the awkwardness of using a web browser as the main window, plus having to upload all files to a shared web space where your tools aren't available. (Forget dynamic documents which mix code and text.)
Markdown is insufficient for academic writing. It has a tiny fraction of the flexibility of LaTeX. Markdown is great for writing casual blog entries, but if you're trying to typeset a book or a journal article, it's insufficient.
I'm an academic, and I use markdown, because I don't want to do my own typesetting. I want to write a paper. When I open my document I want to see:
title: Title of article
author: Author Name
not 300 lines of backslashes. When there's an image in the text, I want to see ``, not some huge paragraph starting with `\float`.
So you expect (and trust) the journal to do all the typesetting for you?
At some point, someone has to convert your Markdown to LaTeX and properly typeset it.
Beyond that, how do you handle equations? I assume you embed LaTeX in your Markdown for that. How do you handle references? Do you use a BibTeX extension for Markdown?
In the end, I doubt that your setup is much simpler than just loading the LaTeX template for whatever journal you're submitting to, and adding your content.
It wasn't until I started doing my PhD work where I realized the Overleaf is useful, because the collaborative tools are extremely handy. LaTeX is very popular in the academic world, and Overleaf allows me to easily work on papers with my advisors (who live in a different continent). It's been great.
I do wish they'd add Pandoc support; LaTeX is cool but I find Markdown considerably more pleasant about 95% of the time, so it'd be great if they could let us use that, though I realize this is probably easier said than done.