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This is a guest blog post by Joseph Wright, creator of the learnlatex.org site. Joseph is also author of the Some TeX Developments blog, member of the LaTeX Project and active contributor on TeX StackExchange.

Introduction

LaTeX is a great system for producing technical documents, but as it is not a word processor, there is an entry barrier. In many ways, learning LaTeX is like learning a 'real' programming language: we have input ('code') and run ('compile') to get output. It's not surprising, therefore, that we might look at how people learn those 'real' programming languages and want to provide similar tools. A quick search will show that while books remain important resources, interactive web-based training is the first contact many users have with a whole range of programming tools. The learnlatex.org project was born out of the desire to provide the same easy-to-access approach for LaTeX beginners.

Overleaf is sponsoring Cornell University's Unmanned Air Systems (CUAir) team for the second year running!

We're delighted with the reaction since they switched to using Overleaf for their technical documentation, which Sheel from the Design & Operations Team at CUAir sums up very succinctly:

“Overleaf truly embraces a collaborative culture, and we’re proof of that. We’ll still be using Overleaf for next year’s journal paper; we’ve loved using Overleaf.”

Sheel Yerneni, Design & Operations Team - CUAir

The Zebracorns High School Robotics team from Durham, North Carolina, USA, consists of approximately 40-50 students who design, build, program and test a 150-pound robot to compete in various robotics competitions throughout the year.

It has certainly been an unexpected six months since the start of 2020. Back on January 1st, when we all celebrated the start of the new year, none of us expected the lockdown and global pandemic that would follow, nor the events in the USA that would galvanise Black Lives Matter around the world.

In amongst all of this, in early June we reached the milestone of six million users worldwide, after hitting five million last November. We also saw our best-ever month for active users in May, driven both by the natural growth of Overleaf we’ve seen each year since we started back in 2012, and also the accelerated move to online collaborative tools in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic which has swept across the globe in a few short months.

New feature! You can now select which TeX Live version will be used to compile your Overleaf project. This enables you to work with the latest available versions of LaTeX packages, lets you adjust your projects to run with older versions as required, and helps you submit your work to publishers that use a specific TeX Live version to compile submissions.