Edit: for avoidance of doubt, I'm one of the founders of WriteLaTeX/Overleaf -- we've been providing LaTeX compilation-as-a-service for ~8 years now!
The bean counters don't have a problem paying Microsoft the amount of a small African nation's GDP per year, but I pay for my Overleaf pro account out of my own back pocket, and can't even claim it back on expenses...
This is ridiculous, how on earth a serious university have come to that?. If you need a laptop or an external disk you need to also buy it yourself?
I have one piece of commercial FEM software that is only ever "licensed not sold" [annually] -- an annual license is ~£1k; a perpetual one ~£100k. It's quite clear that the company want to go in that direction. I hate it. I don't like subscriptions, and I get riled by central university finance departments every single time...
Ironically, laptops and hard drives etc are quite easy to purchase: they count as 'consumables' and I have never worked in a department that actually audits their lifecycle properly -- much like lab reagents, once they're bought, the university [or my interactions with it at any rate] doesn't seem to even care if the first thing I do is throw it in a bin. This is a Good Thing™ as far as I'm concerned. Having decent computing wherever I am is absolutely key to getting my job done.
Slightly more on topic, the other thing I would say is that quantitative departments are very good at teaching their students LaTeX, but not necessarily teaching them to it well. I won't exactly say that learning TeX made me a better physicist, but it definitely helped me communicate like a professional one. I interact a lot with doctors and bioscientists -- I basically work in medical imaging -- and trying to cross that divide is very hard; we forget that doing a physics degree gives you lots of transferable skills. Overleaf is excellent at providing a "user-friendly face" for projects that I can share with doctors -- they don't need to understand the code, nor have the distribution installed locally; they can just contribute to a paper in progress quite easily, and in particular it's "track changes" feature is something that they like. My team and I tend to use git and % comments, but the value of a web UI is definitely there.
Debugging problems like alluded to in the original article is definitely easier locally, however.
Notice that you can have both things here. Each overleaf project is actually a git repo that you can clone and edit locally.
I get the appeal of overleaf for collaborating (I never used it myself, but it seems like a great platform!), but what is it that you consider a massive improvement in overleaf over git+local compiling?
The other major argument is, of course, that you get an off-site backup "for free" for something as life-changing as your doctoral thesis, too.
†Of course, the other thing about having lots of local commits is that you can easily graph, say, words as quantified by texcount vs time and include the resulting diagram in the final copy of the document...
you might like latexmk, which automates running the right tools in the right order. It's pretty neat. It detects whether to run bibtex or biber (and when) and whether another run of (pdf|lua|xe)latex is required to resolve references/citations/..., etc.
(1) The cognitive overload of the git push and pull - while this might have seemed small when I was using this workflow, I don't have these steps anymore making them seem unnecessary in retrospect. Reduced steps in general are better IMHO: same reason as to why I might use something like Google docs, even though, a somewhat equivalent workflow would involve going via GitHub.
(2) Ensuring all local environments are similar or identical. Esp. a problem when installing new packages, say on device 1... when compiling on device 2, I need to either remember to do this by noting it somewhere (e.g. modifying the makefile), or I am reminded of it with a compilation failure.
Small gains perhaps, but they add up. Esp. if you are working on multiple documents at the same time (I typically have 2-3 active documents).
[1] If it matters, I need to switch between 3 devices running windows, ubuntu, elementary OS.
Great work! I depend on sharelatex/overleaf since a long time to collaborate with other people writing articles. It is especially great that your software is always available under the AGPL license.
We use mostly the git interface, not the web editor. Do you know why it is so ridiculously slow to pull/push? Like, 20 or 30 seconds when it manages to work?
If you have a lot of files or some large files it can slow things down a lot. The git server is something that's due for a revamp, but as it stands the best thing you can do for now is separate out your LaTeX content and other project assets into different repositories. (We usually see these kind of problems when people have a bunch of non-document stuff in their Overleaf project)
Thanks for the suggestion! Indeed the largest repos are the slowest to update, even when we only change a single character on a small text file. This behavior is surprising because it is not what happens in git proper, some other part of the system must be introducing the delay.
I look forward to a normalization of overleaf's git interface, most notably the ability to have regular files, symbolic links and so on.
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