How to deal with overleaf incompatibilities?

Question

Disclaimer: I never used overleaf, nor have I the faintest motivation to ever use it. And this post is related to this post.

However, I am getting increasingly concerned by the fact that overleaf has their own installation, which produces error messages that are, well, let's say not as clear as they could be, and errors on codes that run fine on standard TeX installations. This means you can write a perfectly working answer that you tested and then get told

your code produces errors!

Not on my standard TeX installation. What errors?

I don't know, I am using overleaf.

Meanwhile this has lead to very ingenious solutions to find out which version of, say, tikzmark one is using. This would not be necessary if overleaf

• kept their installation relatively up-to-date,
• provided their users with obvious means to get the information which version of what they are using, and
• provided meaningful error messages (instead of just swallowing some errors).

The current state of affairs can make it somewhat cumbersome to answer questions by overleaf users. Even worse, when they post answers, these answers may have errors that overleaf just suppressed and thus went unnoticed. What is more, if you answer a question by overleaf users you just cannot use more recent packages that may provide a much more elegant solution to the problem. One way one may think about this that there is a company which is making profit with LaTeX, a freely available tool which is maintained by a very enthusiastic team, and the packages of which are written by enthusiastic users. However, due to their policy the quality of the posts on this site run by volunteers gets affected in a negative way.

Question: How should we deal with that?

Answer 1

The problem is not specific to overleaf: There are (and always have been) enough users without any clues what tex system (or even OS) they are actually using ("I use texstudio" is a frequent answer), or where they can find log-files and how to read them.

overleaf is actually easier to handle than some private TeX-installation in this respect as much more is known or can easily be found out about the system and there are a number of answers already providing the needed screenshots to teach the new users.

There are also (and always have been) enough other users with outdated tex system. Here your options are

• tell the user "sorry it will work only in a current system".
• adapt your answer so that it works in the older system (you can install older texlive for tests).

For overleaf users the first option is difficult. But I don't see why it should be technically difficult for overleaf to provide two tex systems, one stable, one current so imho if this gets implemented depends on if they see some gain in it and if enough of their customer requests it.

Answer 2

I'm afraid we can't.

Overleaf is an independent company, independent of TUG or similar.
They can do whatever they like.

However, I use Overleaf to write the answers I post on TeX.SE and, in my opinion, they have much more merits than flaws.
For example, their help desk is very efficient (even to free-account users), and their templates are convenient.
I also think they have improved after merging with ShareLaTeX.

It's true that they make money "taking advantage" of the work of volunteers, but we should also consider that they contribute to spreading the LaTeX culture all over the world (they also appear in the Institutional members of the TeX Users Group and TUG donors lists, I hope they are generous).
It's straightforward to use Overleaf by a beginner: nothing to install, no complicate compiling steps to learn, easy way to collaborate with others on the same document.
Imagine you're a poor student and you can only use the computer of your University of which you're not the admin, how could you write your thesis in LaTeX if it is not installed on the machine you're using?
I don't know if we can share a Twitter message here, but this is the reason why we should love Overleaf: https://twitter.com/agodemar/status/1171353926618288128.

I use Overleaf with a free account, I have never paid them, nonetheless, I have always received a quick and correct help by their customer service every time I wrote to them.

Of course, if I was solving the Riemann hypothesis, I wouldn't use Overleaf to write my document, but that is another topic.
After all, privacy/secrecy problems would arise in any case if you're on the Internet, even if you're simply using your e-mail.

I think they can't often update because it may create some problems for their users (and they have more than 4,000,000 users).
As Barbara Beeton says: "never update when you're close to a due date," but in such a huge number of users there will be a huge number of due dates!
As Skillmon pointed out in their comment, it is not a problem for the existing projects. Overleaf manages the different TL installations they have in such a way that the time the project was created determines which version is used. So even if they add the new TL version, it will not break any existing project.
However, I think that to install a new TL in a complex environment is not so easy as to do it on your computer.

What we can do is to teach users how to find out and read the log of their documents on Overleaf or other tricks if that is not enough.

Eventually, I would like to thank Overleaf because they are tikzducks/tikzlings fans. See their blog post TeX Live upgrade—September 2019: And finally, you can now typeset ducks.

Answer 3

Disclaimer: I use Overleaf quite often, but I am not in the Overleaf team (of course)

Here are my thoughts about the points above:

• kept their installation relatively up-to-date,

  IMHO it is not easy. In order to update, Overleaf has to turn down the whole system, or make the system inaccessible. You should not compile any document during a TeX installation, should you? But Overleaf is being used in every seconds all over the world (well or nearly so), and a 5-minute break can cause great trouble.

  For example, I was compiling a short "check" document (well I never use Overleaf for my actual documents, I only use it for some check.tex to test TikZ pictures for example...) and got the annoying "Server Error". I knew the Twitter account of Overleaf in advance, so I went to see, and yes,

  https://twitter.com/overleaf/status/1115621564563841026?s=20

  After about 5–10 minutes or so, Overleaf came back. However, that is a great interval to me at that time.

  But TeX distributions never take short time to update/install (yes it only takes minutes to update if we do it often, but Overleaf has not been updated for a very long time). Overleaf has only one way to update/install the TeX distributions: make a new version of Overleaf (Overleaf v3?). You may see that the TeX distribution of Overleaf v1 is much older than that of Overleaf v2, which is the current version.

• provided their users with obvious means to get the information which version of what they are using, and

  Users can always view the raw log anytime they want. The problem is whether the user is willing to know the version, not whether Overleaf has given some information.

  

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• provided meaningful error messages (instead of just swallowing some errors).

  The problem is not that Overleaf swallow error messages. It is that Overleaf doesn't prevent the PDF file to be produced if there are no fatal errors:

  

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  \mathbb is undefined so Overleaf just ignores it instead of terminating the compilation.

  While this is a major drawback of Overleaf, I think the user has a more responsibility here. They know that there are errors (the big and are there), but they don't understand the importance of fixing the errors. It is like me when I first used LaTeX: I just attempted to fix fatal errors. So the user must be aware that they must not ignore error messages (I don't even allow myself to ignore warning messages now).

  So, if the user don't ignore the message, he/she can click on the button and see a more detailed error message than the error message on my main editor.

  

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