Overleaf is a collaborative writing and publishing system designed to make the process of producing academic papers much quicker for both authors and publishers, from Writelatex Limited in London.
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Sublime Text
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Sublime Text is a highly customizable text editing solution featuring advanced API, Goto functions, and other features, from Sublime HQ in Sydney.
Overleaf is great for writing scientific and research documents, especially when there is a lot of technical detail and mathematics involved. It shines when using complicated formats such as double column, or changing font sizes and still maintaining professional looking formatting. One of the best features is the collaborative writing with people in your team. You can work on a document together, leave notes and comments for the other person to read, and if you have the paid subscription the version history feature is great. The only time I think Overleaf is not suitable is when the document complexity does not justify it - for a simple document without mathematics and just a few paragraphs, or a rough document which does not need to be shared - a simple Microsoft Word document will be better
My CMS has a small window in which I can edit custom HTML/CSS. It can be expanded some, but not as much as I would like. It also displays all code as dark text on a white background. On a page where I am doing extensive custom coding, it is helpful to see it in a larger window and in a color-coded display so that I don't have to strain my eyes as hard. Especially when I'm trying to scan for specific elements and target issues and so that I don't have to scroll endlessly in a tiny window.
In a world of free and open text editors, Sublime Text does ask for donations. You can use the product freely with only a very infrequent popup asking for donations. You can use it however long you like without paying, but it is well worth it to donate to.
People not used to the functionality may need a bit of time to get up to speed using the documentation.
An integrated terminal would be nice, but that is just a quibble. It's hard to find many cons with Sublime Text.
It's easy to use for a variety of skill levels. It has most features you could want from an text editor and LaTeX editor. Collaboration is easy for all skill levels including for first time users. The UI is pleasant enough and the website is quick to load. All the packages you need are available.
This is a programmers tool. As such a lot of the features and benefits are lost on a non-technical user. To get the most out of the tool you need to have a basic crash course in how it works and what it can do. The documentation and community are good, but it takes a bit of time to get up to speed.
Never had to use their customer support before. There is ample documentation online so it's straightforward to find a solution to any problem you might encounter. For example, I needed to convert a string of HTML code to a properly formatted HTML file to "modify." Easy to do when there are so many users of the product who have needed to do that same thing before.
Alongside Overleaf, we have tried using Microsoft Word and Google Docs to write reports. While they all let you write in the same document at once, Overleaf just works better for us. Microsoft Word locks the paragraph someone else is working on to avoid others messing with it before the original writer is done. However, it is often slow to open those paragraphs up for others to edit. Google Docs is the hardest one of them to make a good layout on, though with the app, it can be good for proofreading on the go.
Sublime is more customizable and one can easily modify a lot of its features. On the contrary Visual Studio only has limited customizability features. Sublime text is also very light and not bloated as opposed to Visual Studio IDE. We also chose sublime because it has much better support for the majority of languages(especially Python) and I primarily work with python.
