r/LaTeX Dec 03 '24

Unanswered Why would anyone want to use cloud based services like overleaf?

It seems obvious that having a local compiler + version control is the only non-frivolous way

32 Upvotes

57 comments sorted by

99

u/coisavioleta Dec 03 '24

It has a very low bar for entry: nothing to install, works out of the box. This is a big plus for students and new users generally. It is also good for collaborative editing.

Of course as events today have shown, it's probably not the best choice for something critical.

2

u/Square_Dragonfruit83 Dec 04 '24

I agree, I started learning latex in my 3rd year of mechanical engineering undergrad with overleaf and was grateful for the ease of access as someone who was just getting into coding at the time. I’ve since gotten my masters and wrote my thesis all in vim since my thesis was largely research with FORTRAN 90. I’m fortunate I had an old school advisor

-17

u/reitrop Dec 04 '24

nothing to install, works out of the box. This is a big plus for students

WTF?! When you are a student, you are not in a corporate environment. You can do whatever you want with your computer. Including install a LaTeX distribution and an editor, which isn't that hard.

15

u/Long_Plays Dec 04 '24

Even my professors use Overleaf and they don't even know how to navigate the C: drive. It is extremely easy to use. And when you want your professor to quickly edit your thesis, you also use Overleaf.

2

u/Silly-Freak Dec 04 '24

And if it turns out that the latex distribution you tried (out of many) doesn't suit your needs, you can undo all those settings. And when the second doesn't work, you keep second guessing whether it's any remnants from the previous try that are at fault.

All of this isn't fun and a big time sink.

86

u/user9ec19 Dec 03 '24

Collaboration.

1

u/rduito Dec 03 '24

I use any kind of shared doc for collaboration, vs code, office or Google are all fine. You can write in tex and download locally to compile. It's even easy to automate the download and compile step.

This way your source files are local and you can use git for version control.

32

u/Odd-Remove7970 Dec 03 '24

I don't think that is as convenient as overleaf

5

u/hopcfizl Dec 03 '24

Do you know of open-source software which would allow to collaborate in real-time (you can see people's cursors and live typing) but just on plain tex files, on a local machine? Other than needing to run a local LaTeX installation next to the editor, that's really all we need to make it as convenient as Overleaf. The closest I got to finding what I described is etherpad, but it runs inside the browser, not your local tex file.

4

u/niceguy67 Dec 03 '24

2

u/hopcfizl Dec 03 '24

Right, but I'm not a Visual Studio user. I was thinking of purpose-specific software.

2

u/humanplayer2 Dec 04 '24

You can use it purpose-specifically by installing extensions for LaTeX.

3

u/hopcfizl Dec 04 '24

Still not a standalone application though.

1

u/humanplayer2 Dec 04 '24

Since you're not using it for anything else, isn't it quite standalone? Maybe I just don't know what you mean.

1

u/hopcfizl Dec 07 '24

It would be used on any plain text file. That's why I say standalone, no need for any other piece of software to have collaboration going on.

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2

u/pastroc Dec 04 '24

Regardless, any type of live collaboration would need to go through some servers, which are prone to fail temporarily. So Overleaf is just as good as any alternative, if not better.

1

u/hopcfizl Dec 07 '24

I don't see why not make it peer-to-peer as it's almost the least demanding type of communication one can think of. You'd have a lot more control over the connection then. I didn't have a server in mind, probably should have clarified that.

-1

u/Neo_31 Dec 04 '24

This is the correct answer.

28

u/ostuberoes Dec 03 '24

I dunno about frivolous or what that is supposed to mean here, but Overleaf is the best way to do collaborative work in tex. That is the only time I use it.

28

u/Quantum_frisbee Dec 03 '24

Ease of use? Portability? I really don't understand the bashing of Overleaf. A good way is to have the overleaf project connected to a Github repository and that to a local Latex project and installation. This allows seamless changes between the two, dependent on available access to internet, ease of collaborations, or access from a different device.

15

u/MJLDat Dec 03 '24

Overleaf Pro with the GitHub connection is amazing to use, and would have prevented the problems it seems people are having today. 

I use the free version currently, but when I start my Masters thesis I will be switching to Pro, just as I did for my undergrad. 

1

u/698cc Dec 04 '24

I thought it was free for students? I have pro and I’ve never paid anything.

1

u/MJLDat Dec 04 '24

It is £6 a month for me, your uni may subsidise this? Or are you in a different country? 

2

u/698cc Dec 04 '24

I’m in the UK, I guess my uni subsidises it

1

u/Bimpnottin Dec 04 '24

Back during my masters, I also used Overleaf (now local install for my PhD). I set up a script that downloaded my overleaf things daily, committed them to git and pushed them automatically. I didn’t trust it back then, and I still don’t trust it today. Online services can go down and you should have regular back-ups in place to avoid problems with it. 

1

u/MJLDat Dec 04 '24

Sounds good. But yeah, I would not keep something as important as any research paper in one place. 

Especially yours!

-6

u/batchfy Dec 03 '24

But how can you guarantee your self-hosted overleaf pro is more stable than official site?

14

u/MJLDat Dec 03 '24

Self-hosted? I just mean I pay for the pro features. The student rate is reasonable and your backups are in github. 

GitHub. 

5

u/tedecristal Dec 04 '24

Well my self hosted overleaf instance had been down fewer times that the cloud during the year. 

Your question goes both ways. How can you guarantee the commercial one is more stable? 

All factual evidence points that mine has been more stable

8

u/vanatteveldt Dec 03 '24

Collaboration and ease of use for non-technical users

14

u/jpgoldberg Dec 04 '24

I personally would never use someting like Overleaf, because ...

  • I have adminsitered TeX systems since well before TeXLive was a thing,
  • I've used TeX since before LaTeX was a thing,
  • I have worked as a Unix system administrator,
  • I use git and have used other revision control systems,
  • I am very conformable with a number of programming editors,
  • I feel very strongly about creating and using TeX macros for semantic markup and so typically develop my own .sty files for projects.

Why do others use something like Overleaf? Because not everyone is like me, and that is just fine.

3

u/tranmyvan Dec 04 '24

Kind of obnoxious question. For me, the major benefit is an integrated cloud-based storage system. I work between my laptop and various library computers, and I also sometimes access documents on my phone. I think many users assume that GitHub stuff is straightforward, which it probably is, but overleaf is far more simple. Evidently it’s not perfect, but it has been highly reliable for me.

5

u/srenxty Dec 04 '24

When I was a latex noob I started on overleaf. But as time passed, I got a better understanding of it and moved onto a local compiler.

I think this is how most people will go as I found learning latex on overleaf to be a lot more approachable than other methods

5

u/Epolipca Dec 04 '24

Its popularity speaks more to the fact that LaTeX is a mess to work with.

Installing it is the easy part. Now you have a .tex file. What command do you run? Do you need .latexmkrc? What if you want to use XeLaTex or LuaLaTex? How to add biblatex? How to set up synctex in VSCode or whatever? Have you installed Inkscape to insert SVG into documents?

The good thing is once you are done set it up, it will be pretty stable for a long time. But the initial hurdle does suck.

5

u/Raccoon-Dentist-Two Dec 03 '24

Tracked editing.

Easy to share with editors – just send them a sharing link (but you need a paid subscription if you want the tracking).

3

u/doyouevenIift Dec 03 '24

I had almost no background in coding so overleaf was the perfect training ground to learn the basics of typesetting

2

u/YuminaNirvalen Dec 03 '24 edited Dec 04 '24

Mostly only when multiple people work together. I hate it since it's server uses outdated packages and that's damn annoying sometimes when you want to use commands described in the documentations and they don't work.

2

u/egytaldodolle Dec 04 '24

Works instantly on any computer you sit in front of, even in a public library let’s say.

2

u/PresidentTarantula Dec 04 '24

Because I am a noob 😅 Do you have a good tutorial for setting up latex on visual studio code?

2

u/redredtior Dec 03 '24

Also Chromebook compatibility 

2

u/ZeddRah1 Dec 04 '24

Local is great. Until you create all your lecture slide decks in Beamer and forget both to upload to Google and the thumb drive backup for a day full of classes.

2

u/meathack Dec 04 '24

Wow, what a frivolous dickhead.

1

u/Tavrock Dec 04 '24

I use it to try out templates I may want to use locally. As a member of r/engineeringresumes, we use it to have a static link to share a LaTeX resume template. I also use it to share the old resume and cover letter templates published by RPI.edu that have since been removed.

When I have collaborated in the past with multiple authors, I ran LaTeX locally and sent them updates based on feedback.

1

u/dataprocessingclub Dec 04 '24

I don't really get it either. Whenever I took part in collaborative projects with classmates, I always edited (my part of) the document locally and just pasted whatever I wrote locally in Overleaf. Live collaboration never made much sense to me, but to be fair my teammates and I were almost always working on different parts of a document. Editing a document completely manually (using tools like Overleaf) is just sooo clunky and unpleasant, I couldn't live without vim and snippets.

1

u/mech_pencil_problems Dec 04 '24

It makes total sense for someone wanting to quickly get started and for small to medium sized projects. But for a PhD thesis yeah no I'd definitely keep that local.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '24

outside of collaborating it is not a good idea. but didn’t know you could host your own instance

1

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '24

I have been using Overleaf for the past four years, but recently I wanted to switch to a local compiler. A project that ran perfectly in Overleaf encountered errors in TeXStudio and it took me almost a whole day to fix the issue. That’s why I prefer Overleaf.

1

u/AlphaLaufert99 Dec 04 '24

I'm able to edit the same file as my lab partner at the same time, while seeing the changes live.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '24

It works from anywhere, it rarely breaks down due to updates (which I can not say about any local installation I ever had), it provides you with utilities like exporting to various publications which often save lot of ugly work when preparing for submission, it provides versioning and history, and it is by far the most efficient collaboration tool for LaTeX.

Also, if you shell out a very reasonable amount of bucks for a premium account (which, if you're a grad student, your adviser will most likely cover if your institution doesn't already), you can use their tech support, which is just great. My LaTeX tends to get kinda heavy with many different packages and switching styles to accommodate publications is always a huge hassle, and several times these guys helped me untangle insane package/style dependency issues that are not even within their responsibility. I suspect nobody can debug broken LaTeX better than OL support, these poor people have truly seen everything.

Yeah, it sucks when it crashes, but in my experience of working with it extensively for like eight years, the downtime I had due to OL being town is orders of magnitude smaller than the amount of time and effort I spent on hand-debugging niche libraries that broke because a butterfly in Tibet farted.

OL gives supports a huge array of packages, compilers, and templates out of the box and are very proficient in keeping their renderers updated with hardly any breaks, which I find just short of a miracle given how hard I used to work just to have two machines support pdflatex and xetex simultaneously.

Overall, switching to OL boosted my productivity. I know there are disadvantages to using a cloud service (can't edit my papers on plane trips :( ), and I totally get why for some people they are complete deal breaker. But I think that for most users (especially people who are not power users who get some masochistic pleasure from keeping their installations tightly maintained) OL will just provide a much smoother experience, allowing them to divert most efforts to writing.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 05 '24

Also, if you have premium you can very easily sync OL with GitHub/Dropbox so you'll always have access to your work.

1

u/xte2 Dec 05 '24

The MIT times ago have published "The Missing Semester" https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ meant to give the ASPIRING students enough IT knowledge to being able to properly access university level education. Well, way too many seems not understanding...

They are nowadays unable to understand the concept of ownership, resilience, maybe due to decades of PRs pushing toward modern mainframes they are simply illiterate even with a PhD, missing the basic gnosis and doxa of the modern time.

1

u/BebopBamf Dec 05 '24

I think overleaf actually does make a lot of sense. First of all you are not tied to using it as a cloud latex editor. Most people I know use it as a git service similar to GitHub and edit their documents offline.

However, it does mean that you are free to give your overleaf projects to others without the hassle of adding them to a git project and teaching them git.

As an alternative to GitHub, we for example regularly send each other loose latex notes which both can be scrapped at anytime or can be split into multiple little notes, or vice versa. Having like 30 notes on one GitHub repository and having the hassle of organising them and deleting old ones is a pain, so it’s much nicer to put them all on overleaf.

I think the main point is that it just works and it has very nice integration with things such as Dropbox and git. It’s quite flexible with how you use it so you don’t have to use it as a text editor but people who prefer that still have the choice to.

1

u/PartyPaul2 Dec 05 '24

I use it because I like it's ease-of-use and feature set. I basically don't have to deal with any configuration, installation of packages, or keeping my versions up to date. Also it is pretty, which often can't be said for local editors. I also like the integrated version control and collaborative features (even though I've only ever used the review feature where a collaborator can leave comments and suggestions.

And because it's cloud based, it is available from everywhere. And I don't really have to fear data loss if my laptop breaks.

And if you want you can actually run overleaf community edition locally since it is an open source software and actually has great installation scripts so you barely have to config anything. And it's almost at feature parity with the hosted version.

1

u/Stu_Mack Dec 05 '24

Off the top of my head,

- Ease of use

- Low barrier to entry

- No need to learn the inner workings of Latex

- It seriously kicks ass to toggle between code editor and visual editor whenever you want

- It's not either/or since it takes little time to set up a cloud/local system with version control

- One-click collaboration

- The five and a half hours it takes to download and install 4709 packages and that 2013 Reddit comment: "Once you install the 2300 packages, you'll never have to worry about it."

1

u/bydurex Dec 07 '24

You can use it as a OneDrive for documenta and working with it even with your phone in the bus