I’m currently writing a report in using Overleaf. As I’m getting the premium version for free through my Uni, I’ve had no problems so far. Now I’m working in a place with unstable internet and using Overleaf has become very annoying.
Are there some good FOSS alternatives out there, preferably where I can just upload my Project.zip and continue working offline? I have no need to collaborate with anyone or anything like that.
Currently I’m looking at LyX, but I’d be happy to hear about your experiences with that or other programs.
Combine with git and you now have a good way of keeping track of changes as well of you have to collaborate with others.
Is using a TeX distribution locally not an option? Then just use VS code
Before I switched to Overleaf for the collaboration features, I used tectonic-typesetting (non gui) with VSCode
Before overleaf, most people installed Latex locally (see e.g. texlive on Linux, miktex on Windows, etc), and then used their editor of choice (dozen of options here, ranging from dedicated Latex IDE like textudio, texmaker, etc. to more general editors like emacs, etc). LyX is nice too, essentially it’s just a particular IDE (i.e. a nice way to edit a latex file without looking directly at the source file). To collaborate (or just backup), they used a cloud provider (e.g. Dropbox is pretty popular in academia); these days, some ppl use private github repo to work collectively on a paper (but you can do that even if you are the only one editing the file, of course).
Would one of these options that work for you? or do you specifically need something that does not rely on a local installation?
This is probably not the solution for most, but if you care, overleaf can be selfhosted.
More info here: https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf
Edit: note->not
Just FYI, I’ve done this, and if you’re not super familiar with Docker network permissions it can be more than a bit funky, especially if you’re on Windows. I’m sure it’s trivial for folks who’re used to docker, but getting the right ports configured is a bit of a pain.
Idk when you did it, but with the overleaf toolkit, at least the docker networking seems to be no problem. I had quite some problems with updating though. I run an outdated version at the moment because texlive gets updated faster than overleaf, which produces errors when installing the texlive full package. Overall, also can’t recommend.
Oh I got it running eventually. If you were on Linux, it’d be fine, but since on Windows the docker engine runs inside WSL, the ports exposed to a browser in Windows are not the same as what Overleaf is trying to expose in WSL.
I’ve tried, but it was not easy at all and I sadly finally gave up because it uses Redis and that Redis needs some specific instructions that are not available for old/low end CPUs like the one I have in my homelab. The best self-hosted alternative I found at the time was FidusWriter. Probably not the best solution for OP, but still an OK self-hosted alternative to Overleaf.
