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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 i

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.

user_of_the_wek 2y ago
> it's not like LaTeX is hard to install or anything You might be working on a machine where you can not install software conveniently. For example: - Provided by your employer or school - Public library computer - Tablet (iOS / Android) device (maybe connected to a screen and keyboard)
wenc 2y ago
It's the Google Docs of LaTeX. It's not strictly necessary (a shared Dropbox folder works for collaboration too), but it's a nice quality of life improvement. Analogous to Dropbox vs Rsync. Sure you can use rsync, but Dropbox is just much easier.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  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.
  - DelightOne 2y ago
    Or sync it with Dropbox. Just drop newly-rendered tables into the images folder and bam! you can directly reference them in your latex.
- dr_kiszonka 2y ago
  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.
  - semi-extrinsic 2y ago
    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.
    - dr_kiszonka 2y ago
      Thanks for the info! This is Zotero for Google Docs: https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs
- nextos 2y ago
  It's a shame it's not as decent as Google Docs in terms of collaboration. Google Docs lacks some bibliographic management to be a complete solution, an area where Word 365 is also a mess. It's surprisingly hard to find a complete collaboration setup that also works for non-technical users. When working on my own, AUCTeX + git are great.
Levitating 2y ago
> it's not like LaTeX is hard to install or anything that's debatable > I find Markdown considerably more pleasant You could try https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
- tombert 2y ago
  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.
  - andenacitelli 2y ago
    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).
    - tombert 2y ago
      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.
    - porcoda 2y ago
      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.
deleted 2y ago
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setopt 2y ago
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.
- tombert 2y ago
  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.
  - ramenbytes 2y ago
    Like a sibling comment mentioned, it sucks for synchronous work with colleagues. Async is fine though.
    - lupire 2y ago
      How often are you working on the same section of a document simultaneously?
      - etrautmann 2y ago
        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.
      - ramenbytes 2y ago
        Usually right before deadlines.
  - setopt 2y ago
    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…
bgoated01 2y ago
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.
- kyawzazaw 2y ago
  What field?
  - bgoated01 2y ago
    Computational mechanics.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
felipefar 2y ago
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.
- tombert 2y ago
  A few reasons. 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.
meling 2y ago
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.
PunchTornado 2y ago
last time I remember I spent 1h trying to install latex on my mac, then decided to use overleaf.
- twarge 2y ago
  Texifier is incredible. So much faster and nicer than overleaf. They wrote their own display engine in Metal if I understand correctly.
franga2000 2y ago
> 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...

user_of_the_wek 2y ago

> it's not like LaTeX is hard to install or anything You might be working on a machine where you can not install software conveniently. For example: - Provided by your employer or school - Public library computer - Tablet (iOS / Android) device (maybe connected to a screen and keyboard)

wenc 2y ago

It's the Google Docs of LaTeX. It's not strictly necessary (a shared Dropbox folder works for collaboration too), but it's a nice quality of life improvement. Analogous to Dropbox vs Rsync. Sure you can use rsync, but Dropbox is just much easier.

KeplerBoy 2y ago
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.
- DelightOne 2y ago
  Or sync it with Dropbox. Just drop newly-rendered tables into the images folder and bam! you can directly reference them in your latex.
dr_kiszonka 2y ago
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.
- semi-extrinsic 2y ago
  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.
  - dr_kiszonka 2y ago
    Thanks for the info! This is Zotero for Google Docs: https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs
nextos 2y ago
It's a shame it's not as decent as Google Docs in terms of collaboration. Google Docs lacks some bibliographic management to be a complete solution, an area where Word 365 is also a mess. It's surprisingly hard to find a complete collaboration setup that also works for non-technical users. When working on my own, AUCTeX + git are great.

Levitating 2y ago

> it's not like LaTeX is hard to install or anything that's debatable > I find Markdown considerably more pleasant You could try https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/

tombert 2y ago
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.
- andenacitelli 2y ago
  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).
  - tombert 2y ago
    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.
  - porcoda 2y ago
    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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

setopt 2y ago

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.

tombert 2y ago
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.
- ramenbytes 2y ago
  Like a sibling comment mentioned, it sucks for synchronous work with colleagues. Async is fine though.
  - lupire 2y ago
    How often are you working on the same section of a document simultaneously?
    - etrautmann 2y ago
      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.
    - ramenbytes 2y ago
      Usually right before deadlines.
- setopt 2y ago
  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…

bgoated01 2y ago

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.

kyawzazaw 2y ago
What field?
- bgoated01 2y ago
  Computational mechanics.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

felipefar 2y ago

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.

tombert 2y ago
A few reasons. 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.

meling 2y ago

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.

PunchTornado 2y ago

last time I remember I spent 1h trying to install latex on my mac, then decided to use overleaf.

twarge 2y ago
Texifier is incredible. So much faster and nicer than overleaf. They wrote their own display engine in Metal if I understand correctly.

franga2000 2y ago

> 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...