In light of Overleaf changing their terms of service around sharing documents with collaborators on the free tier, I have had a few conversations with colleagues about alternatives and next steps; in short, you either pay up, or change how you collaborate. I want to explore my own workflow regarding the latter option, as I do not use Overleaf as part of my document creation process.

In this workshop / live demo, we will explore how to use remote Git repositories to collaboratively work on LaTeX projects asynchronously, in conjunction with local LaTeX editors or traditional text editors / IDEs, and bibliography management software (in this case, Zotero + Better BibTeX). This allows for authoring documents without worry of subscriptions or lack of internet connectivity. Continuous integration tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, builds.sr.ht et al.) will also be considered, to automatically build PDFs (perhaps for collaborators who review, but don’t know how to use LaTeX).

Time permitting, consideration may be given to synchronous authoring using tools like Live Share for VS Code, as well as the possibility of self-hosting Overleaf, and exploring alternate tools like Typst (though the online version has the same pitfalls as Overleaf). To get the most out of this session, a working knowledge of LaTeX, Git (or Mercurial), and a remote version control service (of your choice) is assumed. Please also bring a laptop (or equivalent).