Overleaf solves authoring challenges at Canadian computer science lab

Strengthening research collaboration

Information Visualization Lab (Vialab) is a computer science research group at Ontario Tech University. The lab’s research focuses on information visualization, with special attention to text and document analysis. Other research themes include human-computer interaction, interactive surface and tabletop display interaction and applications research, and computer-supported learning. 

The lab members write and collaborate primarily in LaTeX to create influential conference papers, research proposal documentation, research notes, theses, and manuscripts for publications.

The lab maintains a range of collaborations with other academic researchers both at Ontario Tech and beyond, as well as industrial collaborations.

An authoring setup that wasn’t working

Prior to using Overleaf, the lab was experiencing complications and delays related to its existing authoring setup. Vialab authors were all using different versions of LaTeX, leading to compilation issues further down the line. Collaborators had to work individually offline and leave inline comments for each other that would then appear on the rendered document, sometimes altering the layout or flow.  

In addition, the need for the lab to manage a repository and run a local installation of LaTeX required a great deal of maintenance—both to make sure the server was backed up, and to ensure that each collaborator had a suitable Integrated Development Environment (IDE) set up as a frontend to the compiler. 

The group wanted to find an alternative setup that would eliminate the need to work across multiple LaTeX environments and that could easily deal with packages relevant to the lab’s specialist typesetting requirements. They needed a solution that allowed them to work anywhere in the world, and with anyone in the world, and importantly, one that new lab students could work with straight away.

The smart solution

Overleaf answered all the lab’s key challenges. The platform is easy to set up and use—users go to the website, open one of more than 4,000 available templates, and start to write. There’s nothing to download or install. Users can write either in LaTeX Code Editor or Visual Editor, which provides a ‘word processor’ type environment for those new to LaTeX. 

“It’s so easy to get the students up and running,” explained Dr Christopher Collins, Director of Vialab and Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Linguistic Information Visualization. “They simply have to get an account, I can share my project with them, and we are up and running. Before this, I’d have had to give them a long tutorial about compiler setup and the package repository. With Overleaf, all that is already taken care of.”

Overleaf allows Vialab and its collaborators to comment, respond, and resolve issues in real-time. By commenting directly within the platform, comments no longer interrupt the design of the paper or alter the page numbering and word count. In addition, Vialab does not need to maintain its own repository since Overleaf handles that. 

As well as enhancing collaboration within the lab, Overleaf has enabled easier external collaboration. Vialab has used Overleaf in collaborations with Napier University and St. Andrews University in Scotland, among others. The lab regularly collaborates with institutions around the US using Overleaf, and also with research centers such as SRI International, an independent nonprofit that helps take the most advanced R&D from the lab to the marketplace.