
ShareLaTeX Joins Overleaf - nipun_batra
https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2017/07/20/sharelatex-joins-overleaf.html
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pfooti
I'm somewhat bummed about this - I am a _big_ fan of ShareLaTeX, and have been
using it for quite some time. I absolutely love that the whole thing is built
on an open-source engine (not just the latex part - you can self-host if you
want). Overleaf has a lot of also-interesting features, and probably a more
robust revenue stream, but it's always a bit of a bummer when the open-source
player in the market gets bought out by the closed-source one.

Hopefully that last bit in the announcement remains true: _" Both Overleaf and
ShareLaTeX are committed to ensuring that all of the open ShareLaTeX code base
will remain open source and will continue to be actively developed."_

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jpallen
Thanks for the kind words about ShareLaTeX! It's always great to hear that
people have enjoyed it.

The open source nature of ShareLaTeX isn't just about being good internet
citizens, it's also been core to the ShareLaTeX business. As far as we can
tell, it's only helped us to grow, from community goodwill, publicity, and
onboarding for our onsite enterprise offering. We're very much bringing two
thriving businesses together here, to get to where we want to get to quicker,
without duplicating effort. And the open-source aspect is a strength that we
plan to keep.

\- James, ShareLaTeX co-founder

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jpallen
Hey, James from ShareLaTeX here. We’re very excited about what this means for
ShareLaTeX and Overleaf! The blog post says most of what we wanted to say, but
all four founders from ShareLaTeX and Overleaf are around this evening (we’re
in the UK) to answer questions if you have any. Give us a little while to
reply though, since we’re all trying to have dinner too! :)

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leipert
I just did your survey, but forgot to mention a feature idea. I recently
finished a typesetting a master thesis, which I converted with pandoc from
docx to tex. Together with the Harvard Thesis template it was a bliss and took
just ~6 hours to set the ~80 pages.

Maybe a document converting feature (via pandoc!?) would help the merged
product :) (And I would totally pay for that :D)

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jpallen
Thanks for the suggestion! We have played around with pandoc as an option in
the ShareLaTeX compiler, but we weren't able to get it working smoothly enough
for us to be happy with it. But it's definitely on our radar.

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cyphar
> Yes. Both Overleaf and ShareLaTeX are committed to ensuring that all of the
> open ShareLaTeX code base will remain open source and will continue to be
> actively developed.

That's a fairly disengenous answer to the question. The code is AGPLv3+
licensed and they are not the sole copyright holder (it is true that that have
a CLA[1] but from a quick reading the CLA says that they "agree to also
license the Contribution under the terms of the license or licenses which We
are using for the Material on the Submission Date").

What people want to know is whether ShareLaTeX is going to just become a tiny
free software part of a larger proprietary platform. It appears to me that
this is likely going to be the case, which is a real shame since I've always
respected that the entireity of ShareLaTeX was AGPLv3+.

I hope ShareLaTeX doesn't become another victim of "Our Incredible
Journey"[2].

[1]: [https://sharelatex.wufoo.com/forms/sharelatex-contributor-
li...](https://sharelatex.wufoo.com/forms/sharelatex-contributor-license-
agreement/) [2]:
[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

~~~
JohnHammersley
Overleaf founder here: We’re going to make sure that there is still an open
source version that you can download and run yourself. We’re still working out
the details of how we’ll do that, but if that involves open sourcing parts of
Overleaf, then that's what we'll do.

~~~
storrgie
Almost all of my team has individual subscriptions to sharelatex because we
felt it was better from a books perspective to show there is more individual
interest in an open source solution than corporate interest. We specifically
chose sharelatex instead of overleaf so we could host our own instance. We've
largely moved away from using sharelatex but still keep our subscriptions
active as a form of support for continued development.

I hope what you say is true about the commitment to open source.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks storrgie -- I'd like to echo James' point (in his reply to pfooti) that
this is very much two teams coming together to build on each others strengths,
and we see the open source aspect of ShareLaTeX as an important part of that.

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gnuvince
I hope that the documentation for ShareLaTeX stays online; of all the
resources on LaTeX available, their documention stands above the rest in terms
of clarity. The other day, I wanted to know how to do a proper quote, made a
quick Google search, and I was happy that the first result was ShareLaTeX and
I found the answer to my question.

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jpallen
Yep, there's no way that we'd remove all of this! It's taken us a long time to
build up that documentation, and it will continue to be maintained and
updated.

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itsmenow
I personally much prefer using a local setup (editor+plugins+instantaneous
compiling, etc), but of course collaboration is painful that way, especially
given my collaborators much prefer web-based/shared work-flows. Just few days
ago, however, discovered that I can use an overleaf project as just a git
repo, then push/pull as I see fit. That is an amazing feature!... everyone get
to work how they want. Hope that it stays included with the free version.

~~~
Cyph0n
Oh really? I used the web editor once but then switched to a local Git
workflow. I'll look into Overleaf again then.

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paradite
Yes. It's a feature "hidden" in the "share" button. I didn't know it first
until my prof told me.

I think overleaf should publicize this feature more prominently.

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mettamage
Sharelatex changed my life in the world of LaTeX editors. With normal LaTeX I
installed 10 GB of stuff, had no collaboration tools and no spellchecker, no
good folder structure thing.

It's those small GUI aspects that really made me appreciate ShareLaTeX.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
My MiKTeX installation is under 1 GB (MiKTeX pulls packages on-demand, so
there aren't gigabytes of unused packages on your disk) and the excellent
TeXstudio editor has a spell-checker enabled by default.

ShareLaTeX is excellent for collaboration, but I much prefer a local setup
when that's unnecessary.

~~~
Cyph0n
I'm running the same setup. TeXstudio is absolutely fantastic.

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andreyk
I've used both Overleaf and Sharelatex quite a bit, and think both products
are great and have different strengths. It was frustrating to have to choose
and have my Latex files split between the two, and this niche does not feel
big enough to merit two competing great products, so I was pretty happy to
hear about this.

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pitaa
I'm pretty excited for this. Overleaf is awesome! I've used it for a few years
and have over 50 projects on my dashboard, but I checked out sharelatex a few
months ago and was pretty impressed by some of their features. I didn't feel
like switching because I feel a bit invested in overleaf with the number of
projects, so I didn't investigate further. I hope that this can merge the best
features of both programs and make latex more accessible than ever.

Side question for the overleaf team: do you have any plans to make overleaf
truly ios compatible? Yes, I know I can open it in the browser just fine (and
kudos for that!), but when it takes 3 taps for every backslash or brace I
need, it really doesn't work to do much more than minor modifications to
existing documents. There really needs to be an easier way of typing the
punctuation needed.

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JohnHammersley
Hi Pitaa -- thanks for this, great to hear you've been a regular Overleaf user
and have enjoyed it! :)

On your side question: it's a tricky one, as although we do try to keep pace
with the different browser updates to keep in the in-browser experience ok on
ios, I agree it's not ideal. Long term we do want to do something better, but
it's not an immediate priority (given that mobile use of Overleaf for editing
is still relatively low, and we find that a lot of tablet users use separate
keyboards). Hope that helps clarify, even if I don't have an immediate
solution!

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jsvcycling
I've never used Overleaf, but for several years I used ShareLaTeX as my
primary LaTeX editor. I've since switched to using LaTeX through emacs but I
still regularly use ShareLaTeX's great documentation and if I didn't carrying
my Linux laptop around everywhere, I'd probably still be using ShareLaTeX.
Hopefully this new partnership won't ruin it.

~~~
y4mi
Eh, I've used both and have to say that overleafs interface is way better...
So no, it won't ruin it.

~~~
benrbray
Overleaf has its advantages (e.g. better git integration) but I haven't heard
much praise for their editor. In my own experience, the Overleaf editor is
slower and more cumbersome to use than ShareLaTeX. It's much harder to
rearrange files and compile time to PDF is much slower. You also can't set
your main doc to be in a subdirectory of the project.

I hope this partnership means we'll soon have the ShareLaTeX frontend on top
of the Overleaf backend. That would be a truly powerful combination.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
That seems to be what they're aiming for: "The ShareLaTeX editor will be at
the core of the new platform, on top of the Overleaf ecosystem."

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jermaink
I really hope that the ShareLaTeX UX will survive. If I had to use Overleaf's
UI, I might seriously consider canceling the subscription. The dark theme is
nothing you want to use on a daily basis. Otherwise, ShareLaTeX also worked
much faster and had way better example snippets, I think?

I'm optimistic that you do the transition, with Open Source.

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mk321
Why it is better than offline editor (like TeXnicCenter) and code repository
(like Git)?

~~~
cyphar
I've used ShareLaTeX before, and it's sort of the same reason why Dropbox is
(sometimes) better than using rsync. Yes, I would prefer to edit everything in
Vim but personally LaTeX environments have always been more pain to setup than
they've been worth, and ShareLaTeX just works.

Also they support collaborative editing and adding editor notes to a document.

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pletnes
Sharelatex has vim bindings that are quite good.

~~~
cyphar
Yeah, but I find that nothing really matches the real Vim or Neovim.
Especially since I have a lot of macros and mappings configured that make
editing documents in "Vim-like" editors feel more painful because my muscle
memory tries to use macros that aren't defined.

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Craven
I've used both Overleaf and Sharelatex for my senior work and this move is
worrying. I started with Overleaf but had to migrate over to Sharelatex due to
the raw size of my file, which overleaf limits (at least in their free tier).
Note that i'm not talking about data storage per user account, but a maximum
document size. I hope the new platform adopts Sharelatex's file size limit.

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drej
ShareLaTeX is such a joy to use. I used to write a lot of LaTeX, but don't
anymore, so don't even have it installed on my laptop. Whenever I need to
typeset anything, I just pop it into their web interface, do some light
editing and off I go.

It's clean, fast, not clunky, it just does what it's supposed to. I wish you
all the best, guys.

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Netbeing
DAE keep finding their eye drawn to this headline because their brain sees it
as a story about Shia LaBeouf?

I mean, I don't really care about Shia LaBeouf, but I'm unfamiliar with
ShareLaTeX and Overleaf so I keep pausing on this headline as I parse it.

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kronos29296
Okay so instead of two competing products we now have one.

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nassyweazy
Huge fan of ShareLaTeX, looking forward to see the rest

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buildmystartup
I love ShareLatex. What is going to happen to existing customers?

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matthewmacleod
That does seem to be rather explicitly spelled out in the post :)

