WriteLaTeX, a provider of tools for writing scholarly papers in an online collaborative academic world, is relaunching in 2015 under the new name of Overleaf as part of a major upgrade to the service. The move is part of their efforts to make the power of LaTeX more accessible to more people.
When writeLaTeX (now Overleaf) started out a couple of years ago, it was to solve a very specific problem; there was no easy way to share and collaborate upon LaTeX files over the internet, making it hard to write scientific research papers effectively. Enter writeLaTeX, which was developed with ease-of-use as a priority. From humble beginnings it has grown immensely into a service used far beyond its originally imagined scope.
What's also become clear is that writeLaTeX (now Overleaf) is about much more than just writing LaTeX documents – through their work with universities and publishers, they are helping to make science more open and accessible by bringing more of the scientific writing and publishing process into one place in the cloud. The Overleaf relaunch is another step in that direction, and having added some new developers to their team, Overleaf are focused on continuing to provide a great authoring tool that supports open science and reproducible research.
But onto the important part – all your projects, files and links will remain fully accessible, and you can continue to use Overleaf in exactly the same way as you used writeLaTeX.
To mark the relaunch Overleaf have recently announced a host of new free features for users, which include tracked changes & version comparison, integrated spell-check, editor themes, and LaTeX auto-complete.
This year Overleaf will also be releasing a major upgrade to the real-time preview, providing a higher quality display and faster rendering times, along with a number of exciting collaborations with some major names in the research and publishing worlds. Bring on 2015!
