Overleaf.com is really nice too, if you work with others (e.g. on academic papers). The most painless papers I've ever written were with other competent people using LaTeX and overleaf. ShareLatex is good too, I'm not sure if you can autosubmit to journals and preprint servers with it though. That last feature is terrific for academics -- it's how publishing should work, but usually doesn't.
I spent the same amount of time (72 hours) getting one hairy equation laid out in Word that I spent compiling my entire dissertation in LaTeX. Naturally the former was a request from my adviser, who did the latter back when she was a student. Dammit.
If you have any serious math in your writing, nothing else comes close. (Protip: Mathematica, the only non-free software package that ever earned its keep for me, will directly export equation cells as LaTeX if you ask nicely. I can't stand doing tedious symbolic manipulation without it.)
Absolutely true, and although I did pay for Overleaf at first, I stopped paying when I realized I didn't need the for-pay features anyhow. They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too.
An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. LaTeX itself is, and anything you're working on within Overleaf can be exported as text at any time, so I don't worry so much about lock-in.
The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere; I have supported the LyX project in the past, and indeed that's how I laid out my dissertation, but in the end I find Overleaf more usable.
I still wish they'd support Markdown, though. Sometimes I just want to run off a quick, properly typeset series of equations and lists/tables without all the boilerplate. I suppose you could make the argument "well, if it was OSS, you could just patch it yourself!", and you wouldn't be wrong. But we use the autosubmit feature a lot, so on balance I've decided I can live with this shortcoming.
> They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too.
Focusing on internal development is not a justification for making software proprietary. A software license has nothing to do with development style -- you could do code dumps like Oracle while also licensing the code under a free software license.
> An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does.
I disagree. All businesses will die eventually (or at least, almost all of them will). The difference between a proprietary business and a free software business is that only one of them actually makes a lasting contribution to society in terms of software (hint: it's not the proprietary one).
> The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere;
True, and even more of a reason to prefer free software solutions (a proprietary version of LaTeX and packages wouldn't have survived for as long as LaTeX has).
I spent the same amount of time (72 hours) getting one hairy equation laid out in Word that I spent compiling my entire dissertation in LaTeX. Naturally the former was a request from my adviser, who did the latter back when she was a student. Dammit.
If you have any serious math in your writing, nothing else comes close. (Protip: Mathematica, the only non-free software package that ever earned its keep for me, will directly export equation cells as LaTeX if you ask nicely. I can't stand doing tedious symbolic manipulation without it.)