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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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/

Why not both? KeenWrite bridges Markdown with TeX. I'm the author:

* https://keenwrite.com/

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgyYXwwF_lc&list=PLB-WIt1cZY... (TeX + Markdown)

* https://youtu.be/XSbTF3E5p7Q?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP... (TeX + R + Markdown)

How good is it wrt making accessible documents. That's a major issue with latex these days.

What do you mean by accessible documents?

KeenWrite doesn't have a LaTeX integration. Instead, KeenWrite integrates KeenType[1], which is a plain TeX implementation based on NTS[2]. By offering only plain TeX, KeenWrite is technically compatible with either ConTeXt or LaTeX. At time of writing, KeenWrite interoperates with ConTeXt because ConTeXt makes a far superior split between presentation logic and content. KeenWrite can perform the following document conversions:

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> Text (+ TeX)

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> XHTML (+ TeX)

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> XHTML (+ SVG renders of TeX)

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> XHTML -> ConTeXt -> PDF

ConTeXt is able to directly transform XML documents into TeX instructions that are then used to typeset a PDF using a theme[3].

[1]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System

[3]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/

There is tectonic. Downloadable single binary, fetches packages on the fly, hardly gets simpler than that.

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.

Installing it is easy, what's harder is making sure all your collaborators have the same packages and versions of everything.

And the majority uses Windows and have never used a command line...

Overleaf new ShareLatex is a godsend when collabing.

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).

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.

The difficulty is getting multiple collaborators to install and pin the same packages, where everyone might be using a different platform/distro.

Example: I might commit a change that compiles perfectly fine with my version of asmath, but it conflicts with the version of asmath in the style guide of some UC Berkeley department/lab.

It requires choices and knowing what to install and if things don’t work, troubleshooting the install can be difficult. For a first time task of “install latex”, it’s not the easiest. Especially for newer users. I e done it half a dozen times and I’m still not quite sure if I’ve done it right on my Mac (right away).

On mac: `brew install texlive`

Been using texlive for years (also use it on Windows)

I wasn’t aware of a brew package; I will definitely check that out. I have always been using the texlive installer for macOS (MacTeX), which is very easy to use. Although the install instructions can be a bit long and important to read when Apple breaks things.

https://tug.org/texlive/

Enjoy your 10GB of PDF documentation for packages you'll never use.

Is 10 gigs really that much nowadays? I have to think that if you're frequenting HN you're likely to have at least a terabyte in storage on your personal computer?

It’s not about the HN visitor… it’s about the collaborator or grad student who might be on an entry level computer with 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The entire system needs to be easy for them to install and maintain. And even if I have 1TB of storage, if I could avoid an extra 10GB of space in my backups, I’d appreciate it.

try MonsterWriter, it caters to exactly this group of users

The fact that you don't seem to realize that downloading 10GB of stuff just to edit/generate PDF documents is completely bonkers just shows how out of touch Latex afficionados are.

As far as I'm concerned, the outputs are pretty good but until somehow really makes no-nonsense software that can do that in an efficient manner, it might as well not exist at all.

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.

I tried to "install LaTeX" on Mac. I installed latex2html with Brew, and passed it an example .tex. I got `Fatal (syswait): exec " ./images.tex" failed: Permission denied`

I tried to install `texlive` (at your recommendation) also through brew, and got the error `Could not symlink bin/afm2tfm.Target /usr/local/bin/afm2tfm already exists.`

Overleaf just works.

I think you should use what you like and if you like Overleaf then by all means use it.

That being said, I think the package you want is macTex, installable via `brew install --cask mactex`. As stated in the previous post, it's also pretty easy to get it working with Nix, even on macOS (which is my primary OS until T2 Linux becomes actually usable).

Why are you using homebrew for this?

Download MacTex: https://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html

and double-click the .pkg file and follow the installer steps.

You answered your own question then: the reason for overleaf is that not everyone finds installing latex easy.

I usually use overleaf because I need collaboration. Getting your parents onto collaborative LaTeX is harder, particularly because the continual recompiling of PDFs tends to upset things like OneDrive and Dropbox if two people are editing and syncing at once.

Alternatively you could use Quarto. It's excellent.

https://quarto.org/

While it has lot of functionality you could use to write articles and stuff, it seems more similar to Markdown than Latex/Typst due to any functionality having to be hardcoded in the compiler.

You can inline raw LaTeX: https://quarto.org/docs/visual-editor/technical.html#latex-a...

LaTeX is _definitely_ more flexible than Quarto or... really anything else. Tools like Quarto will get you most of the way without such a steep learning curve.

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.

What field?

Computational mechanics.

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.

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.

Sounds great in principle. In practice, it's the stuff of nightmares. This is because the web version commits every keystroke of your online contributors, making it very difficult for you to actually merge your local commits (they need to stop typing!).

Yup. When I was using it, I don't think it was literally every keystroke but it was something pretty granular so that if your contributors were working on the document it was a nightmare to get anything pushed since it kept changing under your feet and causing conflicts. Finish a merge, and another one is waiting.

I was just about to comment something like: worked fine for me... But then I realised that the only time I did this I was 6+ timezones away from my collaborators.

I actually never experienced this issue, that sounds annoying. But most papers I work on have like 2 coauthors, where one of them is usually in a different time zone, so that might be why :)

In my recent experience, it only seemed to make a commit when you did a `git pull`.

To somewhat echo other comments here: users need to be very careful with the git syncing. It works most of the time when edits on git clones and edits on the web interface are being made at very separate times, and when nothing at all is done in git other than committing, pulling, and pushing (if I recall, even signing can break it). But amongst the people I know who have used Overleaf for important projects with collaborators, the git syncing has generally worked reasonably right up until it is needed the most: important, tricky changes; multiple authors meeting online and editing; oncoming deadlines for conference paper submissions resulting in many edits over a short time scale. In critical situations, it can often become unusably slow (potentially tens of minutes, to hours, to get a successful pull or push), or simply fail.

One group with a paid, group subscription asked support about the instability, and was simply told their use case was unusual (writing conference papers with some git and some web editors?). They are now planning on moving away from using it.

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.

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…

Like a sibling comment mentioned, it sucks for synchronous work with colleagues. Async is fine though.

How often are you working on the same section of a document simultaneously?

Usually right before deadlines.

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

> 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)

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.

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

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

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