collaborative editing

Calling for Overleaf Advisors!

Posted on by Lian Tze Lim

Overleaf is a cloud-based collaborative authoring platform using LaTeX, who’ve teamed up with a number of journal publishers and universities. There are now three Overleaf Advisors in Malaysia (as of time of writing on 4 Aug 2016); you can apply if you’re interested, anywhere in the world!

Disclaimer: I’m a Community TeXpert at Overleaf; i.e. I handle LaTeX-related support requests; create templates for the Overleaf Gallery; write help articles, etc. So in case you’re wondering why I’m not an Advisor myself, that’s why. 🙂

Malaysian University Thesis Templates on Overleaf

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

There, I’ve gone and published my thesis document classes and templates on Overleaf (previously writeLaTeX).

At some point I’ll probably get round to uploading the university-themed beamer templates, too. 🙂

(A little more information about Overleaf after the divider and disclaimer)

(Disclaimer: I provide LaTeX-related community support for Overleaf — so you probably won’t want to just take my word for the following; go try it out yourself! 🙂

Overleaf provides an online collaborative environment for authoring and publishing research using LaTeX. One nice thing about Overleaf is the rich text mode — which hides most LaTeX stuff from collaborators who are not familiar with it.

Another nice thing is the commenting facility.

So if you’d like to use LaTeX to write your thesis but your supervisor balks at it, try introducing them to Overleaf’s rich text mode and commenting feature. They just might be convinced!

LaTeX Lab, a web-based (collaborative) LaTeX editor

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

LaTeX Lab is a web-based LaTeX, using Google Docs as its platform so you’ll need a Google login to try it out. Since “sharing” a document is a default feature in Google Docs, LaTeX Lab can be used as an online collaborative editor.

Once saved, your LaTeX file will show up in your Google Docs file list, but you must access open it again via the LaTeX Lab link to get the LaTeX editor GUI. Opening the file from Google Docs will just show it as a plain text file, without the LaTeX syntax highlighting and toolbars etc.

However it’s still a preview release, so you probably don’t want to depend on it for your day-to-day use just yet!