How they test – Papeeria, ShareLaTeX, and Overleaf
Ooh La LaTeX
© Lead Image © Zoya Fedorova, 123RF.com
Authors who publish documents or books with LaTeX can tap into online services using modern browsers, on both desktop and mobile devices, and as a collaborative tool.
Users who have come to understand and appreciate the advantages of a typesetting program like LaTeX [1] prefer to use it exclusively when drafting text. These same users also want it to be available for everyday use on all of their devices. In fact, various possibilities do exist for installing the program on tablets and the like. However, the installation process comes with numerous problems. Consequently, even experienced users are not always able to complete installation successfully without apps like TeX Writer [2] or VerbTeX [3] already running on the target platform.
Therefore, the idea of using LaTeX in an online browser is appealing, because it is a simple and elegant solution that gets around the problems encountered when installing other applications. Additionally, online access makes it possible to work in groups and take advantage of versioning. In this article, I examine three candidates – Papeeria [4], ShareLaTeX [5], and Overleaf [6] – to see whether online services offer faultless capabilities or whether users are forced to accept restrictions so painful that they forego using the services altogether.
Building, distributing, and maintaining this type of online service is a complicated endeavor. Not everybody is up to the task, as is evident from the failures experienced by such services as Fidus Writer [7], FlyLaTeX [8], SpanDeX [9], LaTeX Lab [10], and MonkeyTeX.
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