Collaborating in Overleaf

Overleaf allows multiple authors to collaborate on manuscripts in real time. This allows coauthors to work on an article at the same time, team members to work on group projects together, reviewers to provide immediate feedback, and students to interact with instructors within their shared documents.

Overleaf provides various collaboration features, including project sharing, track changes, commenting, and collaborator chat.

Sharing a projectTrack changesCommenting

The technology that powers the simultaneous editing in Overleaf is called Operational Transformation or OT for short. Your edits on Overleaf are sent back to the server every few seconds and saved. If two or more people edit the file at the same time, the server is able to "rebase" each change on top of the other changes, so that all of the clients end up at the same version. To notify clients of changes made by other clients, we use WebSocket, a technology that allows servers to push updates to connected clients.