Comment by pepijndevos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pepijndevos | Hacker News Reader

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I can not test the collaboration features, as they are not free. It seems it offers Google-style true real-time collaboration, whereas on Overleaf random chunks of text just appear and editing the same paragraph together never works.

I imported a report I wrote in Overleaf, and I must say I'm impressed.

Rendering is not automatic, but much quicker and of higher quality. (selectable text vs blury images in Overleaf) In Overleaf you sometimes spend quite a bit of time waiting if your long equation in a long report turned out correct, only to find out someone else made a syntax error.

Error reporting is also much better. In Overleaf an error in your bib file would usually generate an opaque error that leaves you hunting for the missing bracket. It remains to be seen how this works out in a collaborative setting.

While Overleaf also let you jump to the code corresponding to the rendering, ShareLatex goes both ways. Neither of them are very reliable, but it's a useful feature when it works.

I've not tested it, but it seems ShareLatex allows you to choose the LaTeX engine and keybindings. So Vim/Emacs users will probably like this.

Thanks for the review/feedback! You've identified two things that we've put a lot of work into at ShareLaTeX: Good real-time collaboration, and fast good PDF previews. Getting these right have been core to the whole product - when it works you don't really notice, but if it doesn't work perfectly, it's really frustrating. Collaboration and our scalable LaTeX rendering infrastructure are probably where most of the complexity and 'cleverness' in our code lies, so it's nice to know it's well received :)

These will definitely help convert Google Drive users. As a developer I'm more used to the edit-compile-verify cycle, but it's still nice.

Also made me rewatch Inventing on Principle https://vimeo.com/36579366

I agree with most points above. But one thing I've found invaluable with Overleaf is its git bridge. This allows me to continue working on a paper from within emacs, using git as I normally would, and then sync to the server where my co-authors are comfortable (using the web interface). I know of ShareLaTeX's support for github, but as I understand it the repository must be public (a non-starter while working on a paper that won't be public for months). I would be very happy to learn I am mistaken about the last point, though that may still mean that a paid github account is necessary to use a private repo. I would immediately pay for a premium ShareLaTeX account if there were an equivalent git bridge that I could use to sync with git repos on my own server.

Thanks for the feedback (I'm one of the Overleaf founders). Just to address a few of your points:

1) You can choose a pdf preview, which is much sharper -- it's currently in beta which is why it's not the default, but you can choose it via the settings menu (click the gear icon in the top right in the editor)

2) You can jump both ways in Overleaf too -- right click on some text in the editor and choose "position in preview"

3) You can choose from a number of different LaTeX engines and keybindings on Overleaf too -- again, via the settings menu in the editor.

Hope this helps, and thanks again for the feedback.

Thank! That's very helpful.

We did most of our university project reports in Overleaf. Many of us first time LaTeX users coming from Google Drive. For me it's been great, but many struggled without the instant feedback that Google drive gives you. (both compile times, errors and edits of other users)

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