Overleaf, a web-based editor for LaTeX documents

Overleaf is a web service that allows users to create complex and impressive documents in LaTeX.

The Faculty of Informatics, the Faculty of Arts and the physics departments of the Faculty of Science have purchaseda licence for their staff and students. Thanksto this licence, an unlimited number of users can collaborate on a single document. Users can track changes to documents, revert to previous versions of a document and utilise integrations with Mendeley, GitHub and Dropbox. The service offers an alternative to the faculty’s TeX installation.

If you are interested in making the Overleaf service available at your faculty, please contact the IT centre staff at your faculty.

Registration

To use the editor with a Professional Pro licence, please register using your faculty email address (see the articles ‘Sending and reading email at FI’ and ‘Email accounts and email at FF’). If you already have a personal account on the Overleaf, add your faculty email address (from the domains fi.muni.cz, phil.muni.cz, or sci.muni.cz) to your list of email addresses in your account settings. If all else fails, register via učo@muni.cz.

Preparing documents

In the university templates, select one of the available document templates. Currently, these include templates for theses, letters and presentations. Further templates can be found in the gallery. To start editing the selected template, click the ‘Open as Template’ button.

In the editor, you’ll work with three panels. The left-hand panel displays the folders and files that make up your LaTeX document, and allows you to create, rename, move and delete files. The middle panel displays the source text of the document being edited; the ‘Source – Rich Text’ toggle allows you to switch between the raw source text and a mode where Overleaf replaces standard LaTeX tags with a preview of the final formatting. The right-hand panel then displays a preview of the compiled LaTeX document.

You can download the finished document as source code or a PDF file via the ‘Download’ section in the editor’s main menu, which you can access via the ‘Menu’ button in the top-left corner of the editor.

Further guides in English can be found on the Overleaf website; for example, Overleaf allows you to submit an article directly for publication in a journal from within the editor.

Advanced usage

To automate typesetting, Overleaf uses the programme latexmk. This programme automatically executes commands to generate an index, bibliography, etc. The default behaviour of the ‘latexmk ’ programme is suitable for preparing English documents. However, when typesetting indexes using Czech alphabetical order, for example, the commands executed need to be changed; see the guide.

As well as working via the web editor, you can access your documents on Overleaf via Git. This allows you to work on your documents without an internet connection and to keep both current and historical versions of your documents locally on your computer. You can find the address of a document’s Git repository via the ‘Git’ button in the editor’s main menu, which you can access via the ‘Menu’ button in the top-left corner of the editor.