Working Offline in Overleaf

Overleaf provides a number of integrations which enable you to create and sync local copies of your projects, so that you can work offline using local text editors, and can keep these copies in sync with Overleaf when you're back online.

You can use any plain text editor to edit your projects locally, and you can download a free installation of LaTeX to compile your projects locally as well. You can see some options for installing LaTeX here: https://www.latex-project.org/get/ . To ensure you can run all of the packages of Overleaf "out-of-the-box", you can download the TeXLive distribution, and you can compile with Latexmk to compile everything in one go (see this article for more information on how Overleaf compiles your projects).

Note that it is not currently possible to use the Overleaf-hosted web editor whilst offline, as all compilations are run on our servers.

Dropbox sync

Overleaf provides an automatic two-way sync between Overleaf and Dropbox. A user with a premium subscription can link their Overleaf account to Dropbox. Once linked, any changes to your project in Overleaf will automatically sync to your Dropbox folder on your computer, and any changes you make locally in Dropbox will appear in your project online.

More information about Dropbox sync in Overleaf is available at: Dropbox Synchronization

Please note that a user having Dropbox synchronization turned on does not enable collaborators to also sync projects to their local Dropbox folders (unless they also have a premium subscription). So this can be thought of as a 'personal' feature. For premium users who wish to enable collaborators to sync locally, we recommend the Git or GitHub sync options described below.

Git and GitHub

Overleaf also provides Git and GitHub sync options. As well as providing another quick way to take backups, they also make collaboration easier across teams where different authors like to work on LaTeX documents in different ways.

For example, if you like to use Overleaf in the browser, but your collaborator prefers to work using a locally installed LaTeX editor, you can use the Git or GitHub sync to ensure your work stays connected. How this works depends a little on which option you choose:

GitHub: A user with a premium subscription can link any project they own to a GitHub repo. Once the project is linked, all users in the project can click the button to sync it. So this can be thought of as a 'per project' feature.

Git: If the project is owned by a user with a premium subscription, all members of the project can git clone/push/pull to it. If a user has a premium subscription, they can git clone/push/pull to all projects they have access to. This is like a superset of GitHub and Dropbox permission model - it's personal, and per project.

More information on how to set this up can be found at: Using Git and GitHub

Please note that in order to use the GitHub sync in Overleaf, users will need to have a GitHub account. A free GitHub account allows you to create public or private repositories.