Doc tools: Overleaf

I’ve been working a lot with LaTeX this year. On my laptop, my preferred toolset is WinEdt and MikTeX, but I’m intrigued by the more portable looking solution of Overleaf.

Overleaf is a web-based LaTeX editor that allows you to store and edit your content in the cloud. You can sign up for a free account if you won’t be using it much, or a monthly subscription to add more projects plus a few extra features.

The site has a good catalog of existing templates you can choose from to start a document, article, presentation, CV, or whatever. They even provide an interactive tutorial to get you up to speed if you’re not too familiar with LaTeX. More advanced users can upload whatever custom/specialised templates and resources they need.

The split-view, web-based editor shows your editable markup on the left hand side, and a dynamic preview of the results on the right hand side. As I’m writing this, there’s a beta RichText view of the sources which shows a bit of a mashup of WYSIWYG and source content depending on which document I’m looking at – I guess it renders what it can parse sufficiently and leaves the rest in its raw format.

The free plan has a limited number of files per project (60), and an overall space limit of 1GB, but you can have as many projects as you like within those constraints, and get almost all the bells and whistles. Also, as seems to be a trend with many cloud-based services, they offer bonus space and features in return for social media interactions, inviting friends, and the like.

If you’re looking for a collaborative/cloud-based solution for your LaTeX project, you’ve little to lose by taking Overleaf for a test drive.

Pinning tabs in browsers

Chrome and Firefox let you “pin” content you want to appear in your browser all the time. (Other browsers may do this too – IE doesn’t seem to.)

To do this:

  1. Go to the URL for the content you want to pin.
  2. Right-click the tab and click Pin tab.

You’re done!

Tabs - pinned and un-pinned

Your pinned tabs:

  • Open automatically when you open the browser.
  • Are shrunk down to show the favicon for the URL only, not the page title.
  • Don’t change focus/close if you click a link in them – the link opens in a separate tab.

I’ve found pinned tabs particularly useful for keeping a Google inbox and calendar open, plus the web interface(s) for whatever communication tool(s) is/are flavour of the month with the team(s) I’m working with.

Improving Webpage Readability in Safari on iOS

I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss this trick up to now, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to change my life. If you read web pages on an iOS device, it may change yours too.

If you’re looking at a webpage in the Safari browser on iOS and you see a little Reader Icon icon to the left of the URL field, you can click the icon to strip out all extraneous information on the page leaving only the text (automatically bumped up to a more readable size) and the images associated with the main page story. See the example below.

Webpage With All the Trimmings
Webpage With All the Trimmings

Stripped Back Webpage
Stripped Back Webpage

Note: You can achieve the same results on a MacOS device by clicking the Reader button to the right of the URL field.