Blog

This year has been a huge one for writeLaTeX -- we've now compiled over 1.5 billion pages, serving over 150,000 authors from over 180 countries worldwide. As part of our efforts to make the power of LaTeX more accessible to more people, we're relaunching in 2015 under the new name of Overleaf as part of a major upgrade to the service.

When we started out a couple of years ago, it was to solve a very specific problem we had; there was no easy way to share and collaborate upon LaTeX files over the internet, making it hard to write our scientific research papers effectively - we were stuck with email. So we built writeLaTeX, keeping the same ease-of-use principles we’d loved so much about Etherpad (the forerunner to Google Docs), and have seen it grow immensely into a service used far beyond what we originally imagined.

What's also become clear over the past year is that this is about much more than writing LaTeX documents - through our work with universities and publishers, we're helping to make science more open and accessible by bringing more of the scientific writing and publishing process into one place in the cloud. This relaunch is another step in that direction, and having added some fantastic new developers to our team this year, we're focused on continuing to provide a great authoring tool that supports open science and reproducible research.

But onto the important part - all your projects, files and links will remain fully accessible, and you can continue to use Overleaf in exactly the same way as you use writeLaTeX today. We're hugely thankful to everyone who's used and supported writeLaTeX so far, and we're keeping full support for direct LaTeX editing in Overleaf.

In 2015 we'll also be releasing a major upgrade to the real-time preview, providing a higher quality display and faster rendering times, along with a number of exciting collaborations with some major names in the research and publishing worlds.

We're looking forward to what lies ahead - the next chapter is continued Overleaf :-)