Comment by vitalnodo

In my circles the killer features of Overleaf are the collaborative ones (easy sharing, multi-user editing with track changes/comments). Academic writing in my community basically went from emailed draft-new-FINAL-v4.tex files (or a shared folder full of those files) to basically people just dumping things on Overleaf fairly quickly.

collaboration is the killer feature tbh. overleaf is basically google docs meets latex.. you can have multiple coauthors editing simultaneously, leave comments, see revision history, etc.

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 fuckin' paper (WTFP).

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 everyones comfortable with that, but plenty of researchers treat computers as appliances lol.

To add to the points raised by others, "just install LaTeX" is not imo a very strong argument. I prefer working in a local environment, but many of my colleagues much prefer a web app that "just works" to figuring out what MiKTeX is.

I can code in monospace (of course) but I just can't write in monospace markup. I need something approaching WYSIWIG. It's just how my brain works -- I need the italics to look like italics, I need the footnote text to not interrupt the middle of the paragraph.

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.)

Collaboration is at best rocky when people have different versions of LaTeX packages installed. Also merging changes from multiple people in git are a pain when dealing with scientific, nuanced text.

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

Latex is such a nightmare to work with locally

The first three things are, in this order: collaborative editing, collaborative editing, collaborative editing. Seriously, this cannot be understated.

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.

"Just install LaTeX" is really not a valid response when the LaTeX toolchain is a genuine nightmare to work with. I could do it but still use Overleaf. Managing that locally is just not worth it.

I'd use git in this case, I am sure there are other reasons to use overleaf otherwise it wouldn't exist but this seems like a solved issue with git.

LaTeX ecosystem is a UX nightmare, coming from someone who had to deal with it recently. Overleaf just works.

I'm not against typst. I think it's integration would be a lot easier and more straightforward I just don't know if it's really that popular yet in academia.

You are right in pointing out that the Web browser isn't the most suitable UI paradigm for highly interactive applications like a scientific typesetting system/text editor.

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.

If a common AI tool produces latex documents, the association will be created yeah. Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?