Hmmm I guess I haven’t really compared them on documents over about 20 pages, and even then it was just a qualitative judgment.

Jabref is so great, but do read the documentation when you start. Its easy to use without reading any of it, but there’s so much functionality beyond the basics that I just found out recently, and makes it so much easier to use!

LaTeX is just fundamentally not that fast, especially when pulling in lots of packages. I’m running it on a server with a i7-12700K and 64 GB of RAM, but I didn’t really notice a slowdown when running it on an old laptop, they’re both about the same speed as the official overleaf. With longer or more complex documents, I usually split it into multiple files and edit them on their own, then use \include{} to being them into the final file with proper formatting and the right preamble. Of course, thats using a local MikTeX install, so YMMV.

To be honest, I’ve always wondered why you can’t like “pre-compile” a bunch of packages into a binary and include that to speed things up. I’m sure there are good reasons, I just don’t know them.

Oh I got it running eventually. If you were on Linux, it’d be fine, but since on Windows the docker engine runs inside WSL, the ports exposed to a browser in Windows are not the same as what Overleaf is trying to expose in WSL.

I checked it out, seems interesting but I still prefer Feeder. Mostly because I couldn’t get Read You to actually show text/images from a page, for instance XKCD.

Also LyX will not seamlessly interconvert with a TeX file, even though it seems like it ought to. Pandoc conversion between TeX and markdown seems to be less fixing each time, but is also not 1:1. For writing where I care about being able to draft quickly, I’ve settled on writing markdown with embedded LaTeX with something like Zettlr, then converting to a LaTeX with Pandoc for final formatting. You can also convert to Word better from md than from TeX, for those collaborators who refuse to comment on a PDF.

Just FYI, I’ve done this, and if you’re not super familiar with Docker network permissions it can be more than a bit funky, especially if you’re on Windows. I’m sure it’s trivial for folks who’re used to docker, but getting the right ports configured is a bit of a pain.

If you’re on Linux, I found Gummy to be the closest to Overleaf’s constant recompilation. My default has always been TexStudio, it has a good UI, but you can also use a VSCode extension. These are all just editors, though. You’d also need to download LaTeX locally. On Windows, that’s MikTeX, on Mac it’s MacTeX, and on Linux texlive is usually already installed, but you may need to install packages. On Debian-based distros, they’re grouped into collections like texlive-science.

I will say that I’ve helped friends who were very used to overleaf to a local editor, and they were quite frustrated that TeXStudio wasn’t exactly 1:1 with the overleaf UI. Please know beforehand that if you’re expecting to be able to do things like open images in the TeX editor to check on them before inserting them, that’s not gonna happen.

Happy writing!

Yeah, even if you don’t hack em, I just use it for ebooks from my library and that works great. Not open source by a long shot, but wayyyyy better than kindle.

Zettlr and JabRef

Okular usually works well for me, for highlighting and field editing, YMMV.

What do you mean it’s not open source? FlorisBoard is Apache licensed, which to my understanding is is fairly permissive even for OSL.

Because of the snappiness – codium is no faster than code. For me, NPP is used for making single-word changes to a bunch of files in a row–like vim, but a GUI.

I use LaTeX almost every day for typesetting, and I had no idea you could use it for this complex of graphical representation! This is awesome.

I will mention that while I like sending PDFs for things, that won’t work for any sort of collaborative project. I was surprised by how many of my coworkers don’t know you can comment on PDFs just like you can for Word documents, and are totally unwilling to learn how.

Not that thats what you recommended PDFs for, just something I was surprised by and think is useful to know!

Edit: I re-tested the integration, and it went fine this time–10/10 would recommend.

JabRef is much more feature-rich than Zotero, IMO. It’s what I use, and I love it, but I had issues getting it to communicate with LibreOffice–it’s really designed to work with LaTeX. I ended up having to export to a file each time I updated the bibliography and import that into LibreOffice.

There are also a bunch of reference managers out there–with the exception of Mendeley (curse you, Elsevier, for being the scum of the earth) they can all export and import biblios from each other, so you can try them out without losing your work.

Gotta love Biscayia…some say it was the inspiration for Atlantis when it slid into the sea (which was soup at the time, giving us “bisque”). 😂