Google Docs Style Collaboration with LaTeX

As a graduate student, I’ve worked on more than a few group projects and papers. Tools like GitHub and Google Docs have made it easier than ever for science and engineering students like me to collaborate from anywhere with ease. But much of the software we use in my department like LaTeX for writing and Jupyter Notebooks for data science experiments was designed around non-collaborative, single-user use cases. Often students and researchers will take turns contributing to docs they share over email or another file sharing medium. It works but it’s not great.

That’s why I’m really excited to announce that we’re releasing real-time, collaborative editing in LaTeX Base. Create a doc, share its unique URL with your group of co-authors, and presto: you can edit simultaneously and the live preview updates in sync with the source!

Collaboratively surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

Going offline

Imagine you’re editing a LaTeX doc online with a project group and you lose your Internet connection. LaTeX Base’s offline technology allows you to continue working while you wait to reconnect! Your changes get merged seamlessly with others’ changes to the document when you come back online.

One corner case worth calling out is loading LaTeX Base while offline (or refreshing without an Internet connection). While LaTeX Base supports loading and editing offline, we will make a copy of the offline version upon reconnection. This will allow you to manually reconcile your changes, avoiding any loss or corruption of data.

Loading and making changes to an existing doc while offline will create a local copy to avoid conflicts.

Thanks for reading and for using LaTeX Base! We love feedback, so please don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s anything we can do to improve our service for you or one of your collaboration groups.

Best,

Ari from LaTeX Base