How to Use Overleaf for collaborative Academic Writing — Part I

What is Overleaf

Overleaf is an online, LaTeX based plain text and rich text writing system. You can use Overleaf to write almost any form of text and create slides and posters. Ideally suited for publishing scholarly reports, it also facilitates collaboration with other writers in an easy, free collaborative writing and text creation system. As you write, you can download the document to your own computer and process with LaTeX. Alternatively, you can write a document in plain text, upload to Overleaf, and format it using LaTeX styles and Overleaf will produce nicely formatted PDF document. The best way to learn more about Overleaf is to visit the Overleaf webpage, create an account and start creating a few documents. Overleaf has an extensive help system and you can learn using LaTeX while working with Overleaf on your own. There is also an extensive set of documentation on writing in LaTeX on the web, including a very active Stackoverflow channel and wiki for learning LaTeX.

The purpose of this document and this series is to show you how you can use Overleaf to collaborate with your colleagues, students, and friends to write papers and academic documents entirely in cloud. Some of the issues I am going to cover in this series will be :

1. How can you collaborate with your colleagues and students when you use Overleaf for text composition
2. How can you combine Overleaf with Data Analysis
3. How can you use Overleaf with something like Plotly
4. How can you use Overleaf with CiteuLike, or Mendeley or any other distributed cloud based reference management system

How can you collaborate with yourself (working in different devices), your colleagues and students when you use Overleaf for text composition

Here, a couple of things. First, let’s get started setting up our document. Then, we can set up some strategies of collaborating with our colleagues.

Let’s set up the document first

Essentially, with Overleaf when you first start it up, it presents you with an interface. You will see a page like this to start with:

This is the simple interface of Overleaf when you first start. Click on “New Project” to get started

At this stage, click on “New Project” to get started. This is what you get to see when you click “New Project”

This is the first screenshot when you start working with Overleaf

If you start working from the left column, you can start with anything. Several templates are available, and you can click on any of the links on the left hand column to get started. Let’s stick to the “Basics” for now. You can see that there are three types of documents from left to right — a blank document, an article template and a presentation. Let’s stick to the middle way and let’s select the prefilled article template for the time being. The blank document can be a bit daunting if you do not know much LaTeX to start with. The presentation is a special type of document. You can create prsentations of your or from your data, etc. Think of it like a powerpoint replacement, only that, it works from PDF. Being a PDF, it is device and system agnostic. You can present it on the web, and you can send this document to anyone who has a PDF reader to open and use it (unlike proprietary software such as Powerpoint or Keynote that require specialised software to open presentations). Again, to keep things simple we select the document in the centre. When you click on that document named “Sample Paper”, you get the following:

The Interface of Overleaf when you first open the Sample Paper

This interface is a little complex so we shall take things slowly. From left to right, we see two windows (split in the centre).

The Left Window

The left window is the “source code” written in LaTeX. If you are not comfortable writing in LaTeX, or typing in LaTeX codes, you do not have to. On the other hand, if you are familiar with LaTeX way of writing, then use this pane to write your text and share your work with your colleagues and students. You can also click on the
Rich Text Editing link and get to a more Word like interface where you can continue to write. When you write in Overleaf, you:

• Will use two different header level (H1 and H2)
• Can use bullet point lists and numbered lists
• Can style the text in bold, or italics
• Add tables and figures to make your point
• Add references and citations

Note that here, you are not bothered with little fine tuning of your text or tweaking it. We shall see how you can add tables, figures, graphs and citations in a second. For now, click on the “Project” to reveal an extra pane. It will then look like as follows:

Now we have three panes. You can put all your files in the leftmost panes to get started

Now you see you have three panes. The leftmost pane is like your file manager. Here, you will put all your essential files and will work from here. Generally, I recommend that you put three types of file here to start with:

• Figures (use extensions jpg or png, and avoid gif files although there are ways in which you can add gif files but this is just an introductory article, so I won’t go into here)
• Text file (use extensions “file.tex”)
• Bibliography file (file extension “file.bib”; this file will be produced for you by your favourite citation management tool such as Endnote or Mendeley, or Sente, or Papers, or Zotero, or any other software that you work with. Just use bibtex file and learn more about bibtex format here).

That’s it. You can see that Overleaf has already put a frog image on the left panel, and a main.tex file there. You can add more image files and text files (see above), but do not tamper with the main.tex file. Overleaf processes the main.tex file and gives you the output you get to see on the right hand side of the pane. So, on the right, you get to see essentially a PDF document, nicely formatted. You can change the specifics (the paragraph spacing, the line spacing, the font, etc) by manipulating the source file. You will not normally have to tweak anything in the source file, except some things, so let’s take a look at it now:

The structure of the middle panel. Just change the minimum you need to change (see the text below)

This is the source window on which you will work. If you are familiar with LaTeX and want to work with it, then this is where you will use to write your paper. On the other hand, if you prefer a more rich text environment, a more Word like interface, you will use the Rich text interface (we shall see in an instant). Here, however, if you do not know what you are doing, note that, you will not touch some areas. These are

• That area that states “documentclass … \usepackage”
• That section labelled as “\begin{document} and \maketitle”

That said, change and type over the blue text and write the title of your paper and your name as the author. If you want to add a co-author, do something like this:

Your Name \\ Your co-author’s name

Note the “\\” ; in LaTeX, this will add a next line. So, your coauthor’s name will be posted to the next line. You are all set. The other thing is to divide your paper in sections and subsections. This is a requirement for all scientific papers and of course for any non-fiction document. Divide up your paper in sections and subsections liberally. You can add sections and subsections here, or you can add from the menu when you work with the rich text format. If you are happy to use the source code, do that here. Else, wait till we start using the Rich Text Formatting panes.

One last thing before we move to the Rich Text Format pane. We need to add a bibliography part to the document. As we wrote earlier, for a non-fiction and academic document writing, you need to add a bibliography file. Before we do this, we need to add a bibliography file to the file manager to the leftmost pane. So, we export our set of references from our favourite bibliograhy manager and save it as a bib file. See the screenshot below:

We have uploaded the bibliography file, indicated where to find the citation information, and all set

At this stage, you are all set. You have renamed your paper, added your author name, and added your bibliography. From this point on, you will turn on the rich text format (unless you specifically want to stay on the source and continue to write between the tags), and keep writing your paper. Note that here we have used “plain” as bibliography style, but you could use other styles as well, such as apa, or apalike, or others. For a more detailed discussion on bibliography styles in bibtex, see this:

LaTeX/Bibliography Management - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

So, let’s change the title, add my name and switch on the rich text format. This is how it will look like:

This is how it is going to look like after we have turned on the rich text

Now that we have turned on the rich text option, this is how the paper looks like. We can now start writing and populating the document with our own text, abstract, images, and tables, etc. This is also when we should start putting together plans of collaborating with our colleagues. This can be done in a number of different ways, but first, let’s share this document. So, go ahead and click on the “share” button, you will see something like this:

What happens when you hit “share” in Overleaf

You can see you have quite a few choices there. The simplest and most intuitive options are on the top. You can instantly share this article link to yoru colleagues and students and collaborators using the social network options. You can also invite by sending email. Lastly, you can clone with Git and work that way (we shall cover this later in this series, not just yet). So, at the end of this exercise, you, your collaborators, friends, colleagues, will all get to see this same document and work together in the different sections.

That’s the key word. Different sections. So, how does that work?

A theory of creating sections within Overleaf and getting things done

As we noted earlier, Overleaf processes the main.tex file. A principle of writing a non-fiction or academic paper is to work in sections and subsections. We saw that using the rich text format, we can divide a document in sections and subsections and keep writing. We also noted that Overleaf provides us a tidy file manager where we can keep our files (text files, image files, bibliography files). Why don’t we create a few text files and use these as main sections of the paper and include them in the main.tex file and work that way?

So, first think of a few sections. For an academic paper on academic collaborative writing, how about something like:

• Models of Collaboration in Academia)
• Using Online and Social Network for Academic Writing
• Collaborative Filtering of bibliography
• Collaborate on Data Analysis

We could go on. Let’s create four blank documents and name them:

1. models.tex (Models of collaboration in Academia)
2. socnet.tex (Using Online and social network for Academic Writing)
3. collabbib.tex (Collaborative filtering of bibliography)
4. collabdata.tex (Collaborate on Data Analysis)

We could create these documents right in the file manager by clicking on “Add files” and then choosing “blank file” and then creating them. Here’s how the file manager looks like after we have created these blank documents and put them in there.

We created four documents and put them in the file manager in Overleaf

As you can see, we created four blank files where we started writing and populating with our ideas. We could continue writing this. But if we compile the document, we still won’t see them reflected as sections in the document. We now need to “include” these documents in our main document at appropriate places. For this, we need to do

\include{name of the document}. 

When you do this, just type the name of the text file, do not include the .tex extension. So, at the end of doing this to our document, see how it looks like:

You can include as many sections as you like in the Overleaf document and reorder them

As you can see, you can include the different documents, and keep your writing neat within sections. You can also assign different parts of the document or paper to individual researchers or collaborators and can include them in the final document. So, you can keep writing on the individual sections and Overleaf will keep compiling the final document to give you a nicely sectioned final document. Can you see how this can be an easy way to collaborate among colleagues and academics?

To sum up:

• Overleaf offers an easy way to use text files to write complex documents
• You can divide up a document into sections and subsections
• Or you can use a set of documents and use these documents as sections and further subsections
• You can use this structure to collaborate with your colleagues and students
• You can share a document and keep working

In our next installment, we shall see how we can use a collaborative graphing package to generate graphs and bring them over to Overleaf for displaying graphs in our papers. Happy working with Overleaf.