Scholarly writing and publishing tools provider Overleaf has updated its tool to offer enhanced collaboration and editing features. Bringing together the best features of both the original Overleaf and ShareLaTeX tools into a single cloud-based platform, the new Overleaf has been designed to enable students and researchers at academic institutions, industrial laboratories, technology companies and publishers to benefit from a powerful centralised documentation process.
As part of a philosophy of 'ship early, ship often', Overleaf introduced a beta version of the new Overleaf in May 2018. During the summer, a wealth of helpful feedback on the new platform's functionality was provided by users, which has driven further development leading up to the recent launch.
Addressing popular demand, the new Overleaf platform has been developed to offer a wide range of capabilities to support authors working both online and offline. Some of the updated platform features include: real-time track changes and commenting; private invitation, link sharing and chat functionality; auto-compiling and real-time preview; complementary Rich Text and LaTeX modes; ability to import and sync external files (e.g. datasets, bibliographies); direct submission to journals and repositories; advanced reference search; and automatic two-way Dropbox/Github sync.
Similar benefits have been enjoyed by universities when processing student thesis submissions. At Purdue University, where a growing number (35 percent) of all STEM students now use the Purdue thesis template on Overleaf, workload and review times decreased in cases where students used Overleaf to write a thesis – falling from 5 or more graduate staff/student meetings per thesis to approximately 2–3 meetings per thesis. It is estimated that this removes the need for approximately a thousand meetings each year at this single institution.
By the end of the year, the new platform will enable direct Git access to projects, Zotero bibliography imports and additional publisher submission links, as well as an upgrade to Overleaf's on-premise offering to include the new platform features.
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