For a while now, I’ve been using an awesome collaborative tool known as ShareLaTeX and have since adopted it for all of my recent technical writing and personal project work both in and out of my research. ShareLaTeX not only offers a convenient yet powerful tool for editing documents online, but as the name suggests, share your drafts with others as well. Much the way Google Docs enables authors to exchange manuscripts with peers using read/write permissions for live real time editing, ShareLaTeX is similar, but designed with additionally friendly LaTeX coding and compiling in mind.

An example of ShareLaTeX’s online editor interface inside a web-browser

What’s it like using it?

For my most recent projects involving computer vision and artificial intelligence, I would set my teams up with an initial project document. After inviting them to make a ShareLaTeX account for themselves (by artfully giving them my account’s recommendation link, more on that later) we could all collaboratively edit and preview our growing document. All of us would be working asynchronously at different odd hours when we each worked at our best or were available, while also sharing a synchronized paper. Racing towards deadlines, we would talk with one another through the integrated chat widget, watch each other’s cursors fly across the paragraphs during proofreading, and witness the overall progress of embedding figures, correcting citations and fixing layout by compiling and rendering current drafts whenever we wanted.

I already have a LaTeX setup, why would I need another?

One of the challenges prior in being among the more LaTeX-literate members of the team was balancing workloads. As in my own field of robotics, or as with many other multidisciplinary projects, it is not uncommon to work with others outside our own little tech bubble. Talented individual business or engineering specialists who may have never before needed to use a LaTeX setup, install required a compiler and necessary packages, or even utilize revision control. Intimidating learning curves and setup can impede their contribution and sometimes hampered the overall group’s productivity, as we would also need to mediate and combine revisions through mediums of communication in which they were well practiced, such as Office Word, email attachments or other file sharing tools. Providing them this web tool simplifies things a bit, to something no more rigorous that learning any another new web-app. It goes without saying the perks I gain when I can get away with only needing a working web-browser to write with while I develop and test project ideas on a never-static blur of different computers and operating systems. I now almost take for granted the ability to avoid previous hassles of debugging and unifying my own and other’s work-spaces, issues we’ve since been swiftly sidestepping.

Where’s this headed in the future?

If all that wasn’t enough, then you may want to consider that ShareLaTeX founders Henry Oswald and James Allen have just announced on the site’s blog post that ShareLaTeX is now open-source and available on the github repo. This will allow the team of two to improve their already amazing platform, and empower users to share their own contributions and even host personal versions locally. It’ll be great to see what kind of community that grows from this venture, making LaTeX simpler to use and a pleasure to write with.

Pro Tips:

• You can get a Pro account by recommending ShareLaTeX to your friends and colleagues and giving them your recommendation link to register. A ShareLaTeX account is free, but you can quickly earn some useful bonus features by spreading the word, features that otherwise could be gained by supporting ShareLaTeX financially through available subscription plans tailored for you or your entire lab. With every new referral or so, you can earn additional to unlimited collaborators, revision control, and Dropbox synchronization. Eventual git and Google Doc integration are in the works!
• Because ShareLaTeX is inherently web-based and synchronizes across multiple sessions, I take advantage of this whenever I’m using more than one monitor. For instance, when I need tune out distractions and focus, I’ll change my workspace into an almost “LaTeX zen mode” by opening up the same project in separate browser windows and full-screen or ‘F11’ each to a monitor. I can then edit code and collaborate with my team on the one screen, while previewing our progressive changes in full resolution by compiling on the other display.
• Be sure to sift through all the ‘Account Settings’ and customize the editor’s settings to your linking such as color/contrast theme, key binding, font size, auto complete, spell check, PDF rendering. Again, do the same for the ‘Project Settings’ when inside a project; you’ll also be able to specify your root document, target  spellcheck language, LaTeX compiler, public permissions and additional attributes.
• Learn your hot keys! They are common ones, and thus simple to recall. You can find the list of them, a guided editor tour, and further help through the small and subtle links at the bottom left of the expandable project bar on the left side of the editor while editing an open project.
• Lastly, some common sense. Make sure you keep a download of any recent revision of the project onto a local disk ever so often. The power of the cloud is vast and all, but is to little avail when you find yourself without network access. This may be a moot point if you’ve enabled Dropbox access however.