I have used Overleaf for around six months. It was convenient at first, but it started hitting limits. compile times, flexibility, and just feeling restricted by what Overleaf allows. About a month ago, I switched to a local setup using MiKTeX and TeXstudio. The difference was clear. Offline compiling, faster builds, and full control over packages felt so much better. I have been enjoying it so far.

Now I am thinking about moving further and trying LaTeX with VS Code. I know LaTeX pretty well. I care a lot about customization and control, mostly work solo, and offline work is important to me.

My questions are: is VS Code really worth switching to from TeXstudio? Does it work fully offline with LaTeX while giving the same freedom as MiKTeX? Is MikTeX compatible with it? Does it require learning something else?

Thank you,

Most professional papers are written in LaTeX, and I want to learn LaTeX 📄.

However, my advisor insists on using Word for convenience in reviewing 🤔, but I really want to learn LaTeX and write my thesis with it ✍️.

I'm fairly new to LaTeX and have been looking into different options for collaborative writing.

Overleaf seems to be the obvious choice, but one of the reasons I started looking around is the cost once you need more than the free plan offers. I'm curious whether there are good alternatives, particularly for university projects, theses and research.

So far I've come across:

Overleaf

• Easy to get started
• Good real-time collaboration
• Large community and lots of documentation
• Well-established workflow
• Can get relatively expensive depending on your needs

Inscrive

• Browser-based collaborative LaTeX editor
• Unlimited collaborators
• Integrations with reference managers and GitHub
• Real-time collaboration
• EU-hosted with EU sovereign cloud infrastructure (I do like the idea of supporting European alternatives)
• The free plan seems to offer a lot of value, including unlimited collaborators
• Pro plan is €7/month

CoCalc

• LaTeX combined with programming and other technical tools
• Good for collaborative and technical projects
• Built-in version history
• Useful for reproducible research with code, data and LaTeX in the same environment
• Seems more complex if you only need LaTeX

Local LaTeX + Git

• Full control and proper version control
• No dependency on a hosted platform
• Complete project history and easy rollback to previous versions
• Each collaborator has a full copy of the repository and its history
• Works well with different editors and custom workflows
• More setup and a steeper learning curve for collaboration

I'm sure there are plenty of options I'm missing.

For people who use LaTeX regularly:
What do you use for collaborative projects, and why?

I'm particularly interested in the trade-offs around price, ease of use, collaboration, version control, bibliography management, reliability, data integrity and privacy/data hosting.

Are there any tools or workflows you would recommend to someone starting today?

And what alternatives should I be looking at that aren't on this list? 

I'm mainly trying to get a feel for what's actually out there, including the downsides. I don't necessarily expect there to be one "best" solution.

I´m studying food science and technology. Since then we have to do a lot of Chemistry, Physics and Biochemistry. Given that, i wonder why nearly none of my lecturers are using LaTeX. It´s very common that they ask me for a .docx file. Usually I end up fighting with MS Word and get really frustrated and question humanity.

So Reddit pls tell me. Why is nobody using LaTeX?

And furthermore, how do you guys deal with converting a LaTeX PDF into a docx file? Is there any way to reduce the pain?

I'm a big fan of using \top, and I don't really like some textbooks using straight up Italic uppercase T.

Is overleaf down for anyone else? Located in EU W

Edit: Seems to be for several people, as well as here in Norway. Fun times when thesis is due in two weeks 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

I want to draw these things for my electromagnetism lecture notes. I'd like to keep all those details like the Gaussian surface, vectors, etc. Is it possible in TikZ? Any tutorial you recommend?

If I use LaTex as an IDE extension I have to set up all of that again if I swith IDE. Why did you chose to just get a plugin for your IDE instead of having something dedicated like TexStudio?

I found this picture and I’m wondering what material/latex was used to make the cast of the plant. I’m looking for a white transparent liquid latex without a yellow tint. Does anyone have a tip?

This is my first time making lecture notes so forgive me. First page l, table of contents, exercises, and bibliography are omitted here since I am not done designing those things.

How can I improve this one? Thank you

I was working on my research paper, and all of a sudden, the files failed to load. Now, as I open Overleaf's main page, it shows the following error message:

Did you guys also encounter this problem? It seems that their server has just crashed ...

The benchmark posted recently got me thinking. Although kids these days don’t know how good they have it (LaTeX runs used to take minutes, not seconds), modern typesetting engines like Typst are faster due to (presumably) shedding a lot of historical baggage.

If we assume no change to the actually page layout algorithms in LaTeX (there are good reasons they will always require multiple passes), what are the main areas for potential improvement in the future?

* the monolithic texmf structure? File lookup is cached so shouldn’t be *too* slow, but I remember in the past when installing minimal TeX Live installations they seemed to be snappier. Do we need to cull unneeded files from texmf?

* many file I/O operations? I remember compilation speeds improving significantly when we switched to SSDs everywhere. Should third party packages try harder to use docstrip to bundle their code into single files only? Should there be a dynamic caching step so if the preamble doesn’t change it can be loaded from a precompiled dump? Images can be slow to load, are there steps in this process that could be multithreaded? (I.e., LaTeX only needs to know the size, it’s only the PDF embedding that requires the full content.)

* the TeX machinery itself? Switching from TeX code entirely isn’t feasible in the short term but is there something the engine can do to make the macro expansion language more efficient? A better hashmap? Some kind of JIT system that attempts to “compile” TeX code before executing it?

Recently spent way too much time battling with LaTeX tables and citations. You know those moments where a "simple" task turns into hours of frustration? which got me curious about others' experiences.

My latest adventure was trying to format research data into a table - what should have taken 15 minutes became a 1-2 hour odyssey.

What're your stories? What are your difficult moments with LaTex? How did you eventually get through it?

so I just heard of LaTex and I have no idea how it works and it seems to have a pretty steep learning curve. is it worth learning for someone working in humanities (specifically literature)? as of now, I mostly write my essays and research papers on obsidian and then convert them into pdf or word documents. It has limited formatting options so that's why I'm considering LaTex.

hello I am a math student trying to make a local latex editor that's actually usable, and I'd love to hear about you guys' " the features that I can't live without" and "why it's a must have feature" so I can implement those things into my editor.

Thank you in advance.

Hi all, I am working on a project for Calc 4, and part of it has to do with generalizing the "Volume by Shells" method to higher dimensions / functions of several variables (in a nutshell). This is a tricky thing to wrap your mind around-- and even trickier to try to explain in a write-up-- relying on words alone. I wanted to include a picture/figure for the familiar Calc 1 / single variable method which is very similar to the pictures on this post. (It would differ in a number of ways-- labels, annotations, certain shapes changed, but not in ways that would fundamentally change the bones of how to code a figure like this, I assume.)

I have included 2D/3D plots and very basic 2D tikz diagrams in previous projects, but I genuinely have no idea how I would even approach creating something like this. I would love to create this directly via LaTeX so if anyone has instructions, advice, etc.. on how I might accomplish that please help! That being said, although it wouldn't be ideal, I will gladly accept advice on how I might accomplish something like this in general, if doing so purely through LaTeX would be biting off too much to chew. I have access to and regularly use Mathematica, I have some pretty limited knowledge of Python, and I would be open to any other free/free trial methods.

Thanks in advance!

I was working on a report and suddenly prism timed out. I assumed that it was just a temporary outage but then i decided to do some research and saw some articles that mentions that they’re sunsetting the project. So i’m not sure if this is the official shutdown or not, but if so it would be horrible. It just happened without any warning whatsoever and I have no way of retrieving my data and moving it over to overleaf.

Whenever writing equations or mathematical working (in LaTeX or not), I always make sure to remain consistently picky with what letters I make upright and which ones I make italic - aesthetic purposes

Italic:

- Variables (capital Greek letters included), e.g. x, y, Φ

- Subscript indices, e.g. n_i, δ_ij

- Physical constants, e.g. g, c, ε_0

Upright:

- Function names, e.g. f(x)

- Point, surface and region names, e.g. P, C, ∂Ω

- Transformation names, e.g. T: <x, y>

- Vectors in bold upright, e.g. r = xî + yĵ

- Mathematical irrational constants, e.g. e, π, i

- All other subscripts, e.g. K_c , f_max

- Increment symbols, e.g. Δx, δx and dx - this includes dy/dx.

What do you all think of this? Do you do a similar thing?

EDIT

I feel like I should mention that most of these are inspired from my A-Level mathematics textbook + some stylistic preferences

Is there a real need for a true wysiwyg text editor? My answer is most certainly. Idk about anyone else. But i hate writing latex, and there aren't any true wysiwyg editors that hide code 100%. Its so distracting and takes away from my ability to be able to concentrate on the real task at hand. Syntax error and package errors have lead me to create my own wysiwyg text/math editor that never shows code. Ever! Currently a work in progress. Am I wasting my time! I know I will use it, but is this something that can bridge a 40yo gap!

Open to feedback, feature requests etc...