Get started with Overleaf

What Overleaf is

Overleaf is a writing environment for LaTeX. LaTeX is a way of writing documents where you describe what something is, such as a heading, a formula, a table, and the program decides how it will look. You never move an image by hand and you never adjust line spacing. The result is a PDF that looks like a book.

It is more cumbersome than an ordinary word processor on the first day and easier on the fifth. If you are writing something with many formulas, source references or a hundred or so pages that need to hang together, it is superior. If you are writing a short mailing to customers, it is the wrong tool.

Overleaf makes LaTeX usable without anyone installing anything: you write in the browser, the PDF updates alongside, and several people can write in the same document at the same time.

Windows and Linux Mint

No installation. Overleaf runs at overleaf.com and only needs a web browser, any one, on any operating system. Create an account, start a new project and choose one of the templates.

The service has a free tier and several paid ones. What each includes changes over time, so read it on their page instead of trusting a guide.

Your own server, if you really want one

Overleaf is available as a Community Edition that you can run yourself. It requires Docker and a set of scripts that the project calls Overleaf Toolkit. You get them from GitHub and start them like this:

git clone https://github.com/overleaf/toolkit.git ./overleaf-toolkit
cd ./overleaf-toolkit
bin/init
bin/up

bin/up runs in the foreground and shows the logs, which is good for seeing that it starts. To let it keep running in the background afterward, run bin/start instead. You create the first administrator by opening /launchpad at the address of your installation.

The scripts are written in bash, meaning the Linux shell. On Linux Mint they work directly in Terminal. On Windows you need to run them inside WSL, and the internal distribution in Docker Desktop is not enough, it only exists to run Docker itself. Install a distribution of your own, for example wsl --install in PowerShell for Ubuntu, and turn on WSL integration for it under Docker Desktop's settings, Resources and WSL Integration. Then run the scripts in that distribution, not in PowerShell.

Expect it to take time and space. Overleaf starts several containers and a database, but the LaTeX installation in the Community Edition image is deliberately minimal (scheme-basic) and lacks the packages many templates need. More packages are installed afterward with tlmgr inside the container, which Overleaf's own documentation on TeX Live upgrades goes through. We have not run this whole setup from start to finish, so it stands as a path to investigate and not as a recipe we promise works. Read the quick start guide in the toolkit repo before you begin.

Three things to do first

1. Start from a template instead of a blank document. Overleaf has templates for reports, articles and presentations, and anyone who starts blank gets stuck on the settings before the first sentence is written.
2. Put \usepackage[swedish]{babel} and \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} at the top of the document. Without the first one, the headings turn English in the middle of the Swedish text, so Contents instead of Innehåll. Without the second one, åäö can behave strangely when words are hyphenated.
3. Invite someone in the company through the share button and write together for a minute. That is the feature you chose Overleaf for.

The most common trap

A compilation error that makes no sense. LaTeX builds the document every time, and if a curly bracket is missing somewhere, the build stops with an error message about something completely different on a line far away.

Two habits solve almost everything. Build often, meaning after every small paragraph, so you know where the error came in. And read the first error in the list, not the last one; the rest are usually follow-on errors from the first.

If you still get stuck, comment out half the document with percent signs and build again. If it works, the error is in the commented-out half, and you have halved the search area. Repeat until you are on the right line.