I do self-host Overleaf which is annoying but ultimately doable if you don't want to pay the $21/mo (!).

I do have to wonder for how long it will be free or even supported, though. On the one hand, remote LaTeX compiling gets expensive at scale. On the other hand, it's only a fraction of a drop in the bucket compared to OpenAI's total compute needs. But I'm hesitant to use it because I'm not convinced it'll still be around in a couple of years.

a lot of academics aren't super technical and don't want to deal with git workflows or syncing local environments. they just want to write their paper.

overleaf lets the whole research team work together without anyone needing to learn version control or debug their local texlive installation.

also nice for quick edits from any machine without setting anything up. the "just install it locally" advice assumes everyone's comfortable with that, but plenty of researchers treat computers as appliances lol.

The visual editor in Overleaf isn't true WYSIWIG, but it's close enough. It feels like working in a word processor, not in a code editor. And the interface overall feels simple and modern.

(And that's just for solo usage -- it's really the collaborative stuff that turns into a game-changer.)

Overleaf ensures that everyone looks at the same version of the document and processes the document with the same set of packages and options.

You can even export ZIP files if you like (for any cloud service, it's not a bad idea to clone your repo once in a while to avoid begin stuck in case of unlikely downtime).

I have both a hosted instance (thanks to Overleaf/ShareLaTeX Ltd.) and I'm also paying user for the pro group license (>500€/year) for my research team. It's great - esp. for smaller research teams - to have the maintenance outsourced to a commercial provider.

On a good day, I'd spend 40% in Overleaf, 10% in Sublime/Emacs, 20% in Email and 10% in Google Scholar/Semantics Scholar and 10% in EasyChair/OpenReview, the rest in meetings.

Then: The LaTeX distribution is always up-to-date; you can run it on limited resources; it has an endless supply of conference and journal templates (so you don't have to scavenge them yourself off a random conference/publisher website); Git backend means a) you can work offline and b) version control comes in for free. These just off the top of my head.

Any plans of having typst integrated anytime soon?

To end up with yet another shitty (because running inside a browser, in particular its interface) web app ?

Why not focus efforts into making a proper program (you know, with IBM menu bars and keyboard shortcuts), but with collaborative tools too ?

I have occasionally lost a paragraph just by accidental marking a few lines and pressing [Backspace].

But at the moment, there is no better option than Overleaf, and while I encourage you to write what you propose if you can, Overleaf will be the bar that any such system needs to be compared against.

They’re quite open about Prism being built on top of Crixet.

I don't think any particular word alone can be used as an indicator for LLM use, although certain formatting cues are good signals (dashes, smileys, response structure).

We were offended, but kept quiet to get the article accepted, and we changed some instances of some words to appease them (which thankfully worked). But the wrong accusation left a bit of a bad aftertaste...

...no?

Just one Google search for "latex editor" showed more than 2 in the first page.

https://www.overleaf.com/

https://www.texpage.com/

It's not that different from using a markdown editor.

Also yes, LaTeX being source code it's much easier to get an AI to genere LaTeX than integrate into MS Word.

[0]: https://typst.app