-
-
Overleaf and LaTeX overview; High level Goals
-
Design Principles and Solutions
-
How errors and bugs in Overleaf make us feel
Inspiration
Over 10 million users rely on Overleaf to help typeset their mathematical and scientific work and thousands of new college students are introduced to LaTeX every year. Unfortunately, many do not get a healthy introduction to LaTeX typesetting and thus develop bad habits in publishing and sharing their work. We've seen (and experienced) how much time is lost trying to figure out and rewrite messy and buggy mathematics, and we wanted to change that. LaTeX shouldn't be difficult, and yet many find it to be challenging to pick up. Efficient collaboration in research and overall scientific maturity are all possible without enforcing this unforgiving learning curve.
Our central goal was to make an application that was non-invasive and did not require any special understanding or instruction-- it should be easy for anyone to use when loading up an Overleaf project.
What it does
TeXPilot enhances the in-browser, cloud TeX typesetting experience by providing useful automation, formatting, and documentation tools that are otherwise not provided by Overleaf-- the leading platform for collaborative LaTeX typesetting in the browser. Integrating seamlessly through a lightweight browser extension, TeXPilot automatically formats your code based on proper LaTeX syntax through an implemented parser, tokenizer, and formatter. A user just selects which code they wish to format, and it instantly gets fixed. We additionally integrate an AI assistant to provide automatic code documentation/explanations, as well as generating syntactically-correct TeX. We also provide smaller quality of life (QOL) fixes that enhance the user experience while not straying far from what makes Overleaf great. Algorithmically, we aim to instill organization, clarity, and good habits.
How we built it
TeXPilot was built in a browser extension hosted locally in Chromium. We used JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to design the front-end experience and worked on the remaining backend scripts primarily in JavaScript, making sure our application could remain entirely on-client, and not require any no slow cloud compilation/rendering (a central goal).
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges: integrating our parser scripts without a remote server was difficult, as native functionality was limited. We got stuck frequently on fixing compatibility issues, as the Overleaf website is heavily optimized and doesn't allow for easy integration with the text modifications we were planning. We had similar challenges in integrating our AI, but ultimately found compromises that achieved our central design goals.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Being the most feature-rich Overleaf extension! All previous/public projects don't come close and we have not found any that successfully integrate a parser and formatter into their design (and do not add as many useful features in addition to parsing, such as AI and custom command management).
What's next for TeXPilot
Launching publicly to the Chrome/Firefox web stores! and expanding our design to other web-based IDEs and programming languages. Functionality in this space is quite limited compared to local installations, and we want to change that.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.