Just wanted to drop in and sing my praises of this service and team (WriteLatex/Overleaf). I am currently a grad student and have been using this for ~3 years and it is my absolute go-to for HW, resume, reports, project papers, etc. It is also simple to add collabs which makes it great for team projects too.

The new addition of conference/journal templates and integrated spell check is really opening it up to a broader audiences than just CS-centric users.

My friend (with very little coding experience) saw my resume and asked for help to craft his own. I sent him overleaf.com and a template and he was able to get started with LaTeX in their side-by-side environment and was able to add his own content very easily. I know without this service it would have been a headache setting up LaTeX for him locally and walking him through it, so props to the overleaf team for abstracting the tech this way.

This is great for students, for terms papers, reports, etc.

People who advance science as we know it, and those who target big journals (Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, etc.) are unlikely to want to store their manuscript on a third party website like this.

But it is true that the former group is significantly larger.

Yet we recommend them to save it on github.

Recommend, perhaps.

I never put a paper up on github until after it has been published, and I've seen considerable push-back from fellow scientists at the suggestion we consider it.

Despite the pervasive influence of github, it is quite easy to spawn local git/svn/hg repos.

I taught my girlfriend LaTeX using Overleaf -- having the PDF by the side and being able to see changes immediately really helped. And now she has a really beautiful-looking CV.

I'm sure this is a great product for people new to LaTeX, but I personally prefer to use Vim & Git for collaboration. Works wonders.

Curious, I haven't heard about Overleaf so what's an advantage over Sharelatex (OSS)?

Hi Fractal - one of the Overleaf founders here. SL is great, and had a very nice editor, but there are a few differences between it and Overleaf:

- Rich text mode on Overleaf makes it a lot easier to collaborate with colleagues who would otherwise be put off by a wall of LaTeX code.

- Automatic compiling on Overleaf - you don't need to manually hit compile, we do it automatically. This makes it easier for authors new to LaTeX as errors can't build up

- Unlimited collaborators - share the project with as many people as you like.

- Direct links to publishers to help streamline the submission process for academic papers.

Feedback always very welcome! Lots of different ways to approach this, and we're continuing to build and improve on the service.

The WYSIWYG UI is a good feature, although it's not useful for me it is certainly useful for students from other fields who've been riding Word for way too long. You should advertise more to universities and maybe target the non-IT people much more. :)

I believe a more practical feature is adding roles! I mean Editor,Co-Editor, Publisher, Copywriter, Professor, Examiner, Teacher etc. all of these have different jobs, although very similar they do different things. If you give these poor guys a UI or Workflow, that'd be great I think.

Well, if you need a killer argument to sell your product, you'd have to be able to say:

"You write alone or together, we proofread, suggest media, translate, publish, print or schedule submissions for just n$/mo."

Ok, you'd have to integrate external API from ie. commercial online newspapers, qualitative semantically fitting graphics, smart autocompletions with professional "sentence snippets" and so on. Most important thing is to sell it to universities though imho.