Blog

Following our announcement at the start of May that the public beta of Overleaf v2 is now open for all, we’ve been collating your early feedback and first impressions of the new platform over the past couple of weeks. As expected, this is a mix of feedback on features we’re continuing to develop for v2 (such as the rich text mode), along with some small UI/UX issues you ran into when trying out the new platform.

We’ve now released some updates to v2 to address the most common of those small issues, which were concentrated on the look and feel of the code editor within v2 (compared to the existing Overleaf and ShareLaTeX editors), and on the wording around archived/deleted projects on the dashboard.

The following updates have all been rolled out on v2, so you can give them a try if you’d like to see them for yourself. If you have any further or more detailed feedback on Overleaf v2, we have also set up a short survey to capture that feedback, which can be completed here.

New options for v2 fonts, line-spacing and themes

We’ve had a small but consistent collection of feedback from existing Overleaf users about the look and feel of the Overleaf v2 editor (since it’s a different font, line spacing and colour scheme.) We tested out shifting to the Overleaf defaults instead, but quickly got some corresponding feedback from ShareLaTeX users. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people like what they’re used to, and so after some quick development work the font and line spacing are now configurable by the user (via the left-hand menu bar). We’ve also added a new theme called ‘overleaf’ which is based on the look of the default editor in Overleaf v1.

The theme you see when you try Overleaf v2 will depend on which of the existing platforms you had used previously (for example if you used Overleaf v1, you’ll see the Overleaf theme). The default font and line spacing is now set as the same as Overleaf v1, and users can override it back to the ShareLaTeX values if preferred via the left hand menu bar.

Archived/Deleted labels on the project dashboard

We’ve also simplified the process for keeping your main dashboard clear of projects that you either no longer wish to keep, or wish to file away for future reference.

Instead of having a Deleted Projects folder (as per ShareLaTeX), or having both an Archive folder and a Trash folder (as per Overleaf v1) , there is now simply an Archived Projects folder. This is consistent with having the ability to archive projects in Overleaf v1, and best matches the state of those projects (as they are restorable from the archive folder).

Once a project has been archived, there is an option to Delete Forever, or to Restore the project to the dash. Hence why the separate Trash folder is no longer required.

If you are a collaborator in a project, then you can’t archive it, but instead can ‘leave’ it. On both Overleaf v2 and ShareLaTeX, the wording and icon has been updated to reflect this.

Plus a quick improvement to the Overleaf v1 dashboard

In addition to making those tweaks to Overleaf v2, we’ve heard from several of you that the v1 dashboard could be confusing once a project was exported to v2. To help address this we’ve added a ‘v2’ badge and an “Exported to v2” line so that you can more easily see which projects are now in the new platform.

More to come

We’ve also had feedback about other parts of v2 that we’re working hard on. The changes above were things that we could do quickly to improve v2 for you, but we’re also working on some bigger features and changes like the rich-text editor, labels in history and improvements to the way offline git access is handled.

Thanks for your feedback

Thanks for all your early feedback on Overleaf v2, and please do keep it coming! You can either send us messages directly to support or complete a response to this short survey to help us understand your impressions and suggested priorities for Overleaf v2.