Excellent Way to Get Your Feet Wet with Longer Documents

[Ackbach]

I know others on MHB have discovered Overleaf, but I thought I'd point it out. It has a number of advantages for the newbie (and maybe even a few for the more advanced user!):

1. It tiles your input and output files automatically for you - one severe disadvantage of a vim setup unless you're extraordinary with scripting. I find this invaluable for lots of small files, and I also find it annoying that a number of $\LaTeX$ editors don't even tell you in advance whether they have this feature or not. I think it's really important, because otherwise I spend an inordinate amount of time manually resizing all the necessary windows.

2. You don't have to install $\LaTeX$. Overleaf has a very large number of packages already installed, including tikz.

3. Vim keybindings if you wish (or none at all), allowing you to take advantage of quite a few of those incredibly fast vim commands.

4. Your files are stored in the cloud. This is great if you're connected to the Internet - not so nice if you're not connected. You can upgrade to a professional account, which allows more collaborators, as well as Dropbox support. I think $\$12$ per month is fairly reasonable.

One tip: Ctrl-Enter re-compiles.

Cons: Web site is sometimes a bit slow.

But think about the advantages for someone just starting out learning $\LaTeX$: naturally, there's MHB and one or two tutorials that we have. However, MathJax is a bit limited in some ways, and you definitely don't have the full power of $\LaTeX$ on this forum. If you want to write a paper, MHB isn't the right vehicle. But you could definitely do it on Overleaf. So I recommend checking it out.

 

[S.G. Janssens]

Personally I find the Overleaf editor quite slow and unpleasant to use, but I do recommend Overleaf very much as an environment for collaborative writing. Namely, if you -- like me -- prefer to do most of your writing offline on your own computer, you can still take advantage of Overleaf's positive aspects by using their Git bridge.

(Note: Git is a system for distributed version control. The implementation on Overleaf does not allow branching, though locally you can of course do whatever you want, as long as you merge into your master branch before pushing an update to Overleaf.)

I thought this could be helpful information for people who do have the need for a collaborative writing environment but who don't want to give up on their own editor and local setup.