Simon Fraser University on Overleaf
Overview
Simon Fraser University School of Computing Science is providing free Overleaf Professional accounts for all students, faculty and staff who would like to use a collaborative, online LaTeX editor for their projects. Overleaf Professional accounts provide real-time track changes, unlimited collaborators, and full document history.
Overleaf is designed to make the process of writing, editing and producing your research papers and project reports much quicker for both you and your collaborators. Overleaf can also be linked to other services to best fit into your workflow.
Claim your free Overleaf Professional account on Overleaf by signing up (or signing in) below. You'll need to verify a Simon Fraser University email address in order to receive your free Overleaf Professional account. Please complete your Overleaf profile to include your department and role at SFU. We have a limited number of licenses; SFU CS will share our license with other SFU users as long as CS faculty and students who wish to use the license have access. CS may be forced to cut off non CS users, if this happens you won't lose any files, but you will lose access to the Professional version. If your course, lab or department finds this tool useful consider contacting SFU CS and asking to share the costs so more licenses can be purchased.
Join a community of over 1353 authors at Simon Fraser University
Quick Start
Welcome to the quick start guide to Overleaf. We've put together some useful resources and links in the sections below, and if you have any questions about how to get started please let us know and we'll be happy to help!
Student
Try out the Overleaf editor with built in tutorial
If you'd like to dive straight into the editor, simply click the button to create a new paper using our quick-start template. A short tutorial will walk you through the main features to quickly get you started.
Browse the Overleaf template gallery
You can find a selection of featured templates, or check out our full template gallery for more ideas and inspiration.
Take our free course to quickly master the LaTeX essentials
If you're new to LaTeX, we've put together a free online course to help you learn the basics. If you have never used LaTeX before, or if it has been a while and you would like a refresher, this is the place to start.
Researcher
Find a journal template
Through our partnerships within the publishing community, we provide a selection of academic journal templates for articles and papers. These templates automatically format your manuscripts in the style required for submission to that journal.
Edit in Rich Text mode or directly in LaTeX
Overleaf provides and intuitive and easy-to-use manuscript editor (our rich text mode), which is especially useful if you or your co-authors aren't familiar with writing in LaTeX.
If you prefer to edit directly in LaTeX, you can! Overleaf provides a full collaborative online LaTeX editor you can switch to at any time.
Submitting your articles to journals, repositories and more
You can also submit your paper directly to a number of journals and other editorial and review services via the publish menu in the editor. Simply open the publish menu from any document and follow the appropriate 'Submit to ...' link.
Faculty
Publishing your projects in the Overleaf gallery
A quick way to share your course templates or lecture notes is to publish them in the Overleaf gallery. You can publish any project from Overleaf to the gallery in just a few clicks.
Demonstrating auto-compile error handling to your students
Auto-compile helps users new to LaTeX to find errors in their syntax quickly and easily, and encourages them to fix them as they go, to produce clean, error-free documents.
Show your class how to turn on track changes for review
Overleaf v2 offers an impressive collection of new and upgraded collaboration features, and your institutional subscription provides all users with access to the powerful track changes feature.
Featured LaTeX Templates




FAQ & Help
Who should I contact if I have questions about Overleaf or the Simon Fraser University license?
Please use our contact form and we'll make sure your question gets to the right person in our team.
If you want to talk to someone at SFU about the licensing, contact heldesk at cs dot sfu dot ca.
I'm new to Overleaf, how should I get started?
We've put together a short How do I use Overleaf help page to give you pointers on exactly that :)
How do I upload an existing LaTeX project into Overleaf?
Here's an FAQ on how to import existing LaTeX documents into Overleaf.
What packages does Overleaf support?
Overleaf supports the packages listed here.