Overleaf LaTeX: An online tool for synchronous, collaborative scholarly writing

Collaborative writing represents a big portion of all writings done in the academic environment, and is considered a core skill in graduates. Around 85% of produced documents in office and university settings had at least two authors. Interestingly, the face-to-face settings of collaborations are being supplemented by various on-line tools, such as Zoom, Dropbox, Microsoft Teams, etc., due to the availability of such feature-rich tools and our need for working flexibly. For on-line collaborative writing tools, the ability of supporting interactions during the writing process through real-time feedback, co-editing, and problem solving with the team is a must. Such interactions in the face-to-face sessions occur naturally, however not so in the on-line environments. While the majority of the on-line collaborative writing tools are inadequate in supporting this requirement, Overleaf LATEX is a welcomed exception. Overleaf is an online LATEX editor, which facilitates writers to contribute collaboratively in scholarly articles, large reports, thesis, journal articles within high quality templates. Writers can work on the article concurrently, and hence it facilitates real time collaborations. Additionally, it eliminates the need of installing any software packages for the desired templates as it has a library of all the latest packages for all templates. Overleaf allows automatic real-time preview by compiling the project in the background, and displaying the PDF output right away. Other useful features such as real-time track changes and commenting, reviewing, providing feedback through the review option, high quality mathematical equation editor, a chat box for communicating with contributors while writing, etc, make it a very effective tool for on-line collaborative writing. Based on our experiences of using the tool, we will highlight the tool’s ability to fulfil the need of on-line collaborative writing in the tertiary education setting in this presentation.