Next-level academia! Repository for the Native Overleaf project, attempting to integrate Overleaf with native OS features for macOS, Linux and Windows.
GPL-3.0 License
As many of you are aware, recent changes to Overleaf have made it very hard to keep this project in good condition. For example, the settings panel of Native Overleaf was broken by changes on Overleaf's end (see issue #32). I have tried my best to work around these issues, but this is not sustainable. This means that Native Overleaf is not able to provide the stability needed to use it in daily work, and I will no longer be working towards fixing the individual issues.
I am very grateful for the overwhelmingly positive response Native Overleaf has had over the past two years and would like to create something even better. I believe it is necessary to start from the ground up to create a completely new solution that will not have these issues, something worthy of serving the academic community. I am currently working on this, and hope to share this with all of you soon.
In the meantime, I will try to provide security & maintainance updates to Native Overleaf, but will not be resolving most issues or adding new features.
If you feel like discussing this, please see discussions #38.
Overleaf is a fantastic webtool for writing and cooperating on LaTeX documents. However, would it not be even better if it were to behave like a native app on your system?
Download directly for your system below!
Should you have any problems running the app, please comment on or open an issue! For now, the following binaries have been precompiled and can be downloaded directly:
If your platform / architecture is missing, let me know via the discussions page, or compile it yourself using the instructions below.
Using nativefier, the Overleaf website is wrapped as an Electron app and injected with JavaScript. While this is not optimally efficient and we may switch to a more efficient framework in the future, it does allow combining the webapp with native features for a large number of supported platforms.
If you have any problem running the app not fixed with these instructions, please comment on or open an issue!
This has been fixed since v1.4.0. If you encounter a related issue, look at and comment on issue #3.
If you get the message that "Apple can't verify this app doesn't contain malware", use right-click -> open to open it. If you get "This app is damaged and can't be opened", download the archive again and unzip it using Finder's built-in Archive Utility or ditto (otherwise codesigning metadata may be lost).
Currently, the wordcount tracking settings are globally. In the future we can change this to per-project settings. If you want this, please create an issue.
Want to adjust some settings or just build from scratch for your device? Easily create your own native version of Overleaf! In just four easy steps you can compile Overleaf as a native app for your device.
cd
to wherever you want to install Overleaf.git clone https://github.com/fjwillemsen/NativeOverleaf.git
).compile-all.sh
script (without codesigning) for inspiration, executing and modifying the commands as needed. Alternatively (not recommended), run nativefier 'https://overleaf.com' --name 'Overleaf' --app-version <latest version> --darwin-dark-mode-support --inject bundled_script.js --icon Icon/<select icon>
. If you have an Apple Silicon (M1/M2) Mac, be sure to add --arch arm64
as Homebrew may still be an Intel process in some cases. If you do not intend to distribute the app, leave out the codesigning, otherwise create your own self-signed certificate.After being built, the app appears in the folder - you can copy it to another location if desired.
Please use the GitHub discussions page for this project. This allows others to read and chime in as well. If you'd like to contribute, great! Feel free to submit pull requests via forks.