EVENT: Groups and Combinatorics Seminar: Gordon Royle, 4pm Aug 3 in Weatherburn LT

Speaker: Gordon Royle (University of Western Australia)

Title: Online Collaborative LaTeX Authoring with Overleaf

Time and place: 4pm Friday 03 Aug 2018, Weatherburn LT

Abstract: This seminar is in the (very) occasional CMSC Technical Seminar Series covering useful computational tools for mathematicians.

All of us have extensive collaborations both locally and internationally, and face the logistical challenge of coordinating the efforts of multiple authors in different time zones, on different operating systems and with differing levels of technical interest and acumen.

For many of us, the emergence of Dropbox was the first technical development since the advent of email that changed our collaboration habits, pushing us from “revise-and-reply” to the “shared folder” paradigm.

Over the last 5 or so years, web technologies have advanced greatly, and a number of fully online LaTeX editing platforms (using a web browser as the GUI) have been developed. After a half-decade of launches, name-changes and mergers, one platform, namely Overleaf, is now clearly dominant, both in total numbers of users and range of services offered.

In this seminar, I will briefly describe various collaboration paradigms, give their pros and cons, before giving a fairly extensive introduction to / demonstration of Overleaf.

As with Dropbox, there is always some concern about entrusting one’s work to some initially-unknown remote server, and as with Dropbox, Overleaf’s free service provides something useful enough to engage your attention, but with key limitations that only a paid subscription will remove.