Writing Papers Locally, Without Leaving Overleaf Behind
Now that I'm in full-time research, I wanted my own editor and git for papers without losing Overleaf's collaboration. Here's the open-source template I built for that using Claude.
Life in Drafts and Revisions
Now that I'm a full-time researcher, a good part of my week goes on manuscripts. There are first drafts, co-author comments, reviewer responses, resubmissions, and then the next paper starting before the last one is finished.
Overleaf is excellent for this. Co-authors can jump in from anywhere, nothing needs installing, and the version history has saved me more than once.
But I'm a developer at heart. I'm most productive in my own editor, with my own shortcuts and extensions, and with git keeping track of every change. Writing in a browser tab never quite felt like home.
The Best of Both
If that sounds familiar, I've put together something that might help.
temp-manuscripts is a reusable LaTeX template for managing your papers locally, while still working with co-authors on Overleaf. It gives you:
One folder per paper, plus shared folders for references, figures and evaluation code, so your work isn't scattered across a dozen projects.
A ready-to-go starter manuscript with sections split into separate files, which makes revisions and diffs much easier to follow.
Local PDF rendering with Tectonic, a modern, self-contained LaTeX engine. There's no multi-gigabyte TeX install: it fetches only the packages you need. One command, tectonic main.tex, and you have your PDF.
Two-way sync with Overleaf using overleaf-sync. You write locally, your co-authors keep using Overleaf, and one command brings everyone's changes together.
A pre-submission checklist, because we've all submitted something with a stray TODO still in it.
Getting Started
Everything you need to set it up is in the README. Click Use this template on GitHub, copy the starter folder for your next paper, and start writing.
While you're on GitHub, please give overleaf-sync a ⭐. It's a community tool that makes this whole workflow possible, and it deserves the support.
The template is MIT-licensed, so use it, adapt it, and if you improve it, I'd love to hear about it.
Happy writing!
— Gulger
