Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

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.



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.


Thanks for the info! This is Zotero for Google Docs: https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs


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.


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.


Or sync it with Dropbox. Just drop newly-rendered tables into the images folder and bam! you can directly reference them in your latex.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: