Eight million users! Plus some cool new stuff!

One year ago, we reached the milestone of having six million total registered users worldwide. 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

One year on, and two million more of you have started using Overleaf! 🎉🎉

Just a few weeks ago in June, the eight millionth user registered for an account on Overleaf, as the LaTeX community continues to grow and expand. We’ve also seen peaks of over 400k daily active users in 2021, which is another record!

This is amazing, and we’d like to send a message of thanks to everyone who uses, shares, collaborates upon, and champions Overleaf! You’re all fantastic!

Thanks from Overleaf! 🙌 (photo from back in the days of "meeting up"!)

As we noted in a previous blog post, user registrations alone are not a defining measure of success; it’s also important that new and existing users continue to find the platform useful, as their work and experience with LaTeX also grows and expands!

To this end, we’ve been busy working on a number of improvements across Overleaf, including:

• A new Compile Errors UI – making it easier to find and fix errors quickly when they occur. This is currently in the final stages of testing, and due for wider release later this month. Early tests show it reduces the number of projects with accumulated errors by up to 19%.
• Related UI improvements - this new feature rollout also incorporates a number of related UI improvements, including:
  • The “Download PDF” button is made more prominent and clearly labelled.
  • It’s easier to download other output files.
  • The “Recompile from scratch” option provides a more intuitive way to clear the cached files.
• A new Symbol Palette – providing a quick and easy way to look up and insert symbols. Want to try it? Join our beta program and get it now! If you'd prefer to wait, it's also due for wider release later this month :)
• Improved PDF caching – reducing bandwidth requirements for users compiling large documents. This is slated for release later this year.
• Plus many other smaller bug fixes, updates and improvements!

Outside of the editor, we've also been working on:

• An overhaul of many of our help articles to make them easier to use for learning, by including specific "Open in Overleaf" examples with each code block. Some recently updated articles include:
  • Font sizes, families, and styles
  • Brackets and Parentheses
  • Missing $ inserted
  • Knitr
  • Posters
• Providing a central guide to the Overleaf premium features.
• Adding a number of new tutorial videos (e.g. on creating an account) and webinars!

We are also still running our WFH2021 programme with discounted plans and other initiatives to help users collaborate effectively on Overleaf.

We’ll be announcing the new features and updates individually as they’re released, along with continuing to update our documentation and help articles, so stay tuned for more news soon :)