I'm somewhat bummed about this - I am a <i>big</i> 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.<p>Hopefully that last bit in the announcement remains true: <i>"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."</i>
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! :)
> 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.<p>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").<p>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+.<p>I hope ShareLaTeX doesn't become another victim of "Our Incredible Journey"[2].<p>[1]: <a href="https://sharelatex.wufoo.com/forms/sharelatex-contributor-license-agreement/" rel="nofollow">https://sharelatex.wufoo.com/forms/sharelatex-contributor-li...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/</a>
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.
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.
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.<p>It's those small GUI aspects that really made me appreciate ShareLaTeX.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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?<p>I'm optimistic that you do the transition, with Open Source.
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.
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.<p>It's clean, fast, not clunky, it just does what it's supposed to. I wish you all the best, guys.
DAE keep finding their eye drawn to this headline because their brain sees it as a story about Shia LaBeouf?<p>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.