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My friend and I, are going to work on a paper. I'm using overleaf right now. However, due to some limitation, we prefer to switch to Texstudio. The problem is how to sync the .tex file in my computer with his computer. Overleafe has an online edditing option which I can see what he is typing live, Surely, it is not possible in Texstudio. What I'm thinking of is to create a Dropbox account, and share the same *.tex with my friend and we both work on the same file. I'm not sure what will happen in case we both compile at the same time, although this is rare to happen. I think I need to integrate a git with it to track changes. Please let me know if there is a simpler solution to handle this situation.

Thanks in advance.

Phelype Oleinik
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Majid
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2 Answers2

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I've used a shared Dropbox folder with TeX. Simultaneous compiling can happen, and would likely result in Dropbox creating "conflicted copies" of the auxiliary files. But this wouldn't be too big of a deal, because you can delete the auxiliary files and try again.

The bigger problem would be if are both editing the source at the same time. This would also create conflicting copies, but you wouldn't be able to delete them without going through and figuring out what to keep.

The other slight annoyance is that every time the other person compiles, Dropbox will push a notification that the files have changed. If the other person has the habit of frequent compilation as they type (and who doesn't?), these notifications can be quite frequent. But you can turn off these notifications.

TeXStudio is the file editor. It has nothing to do with the question.

Teepeemm
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  • To avoid conflicted copies, one can put the aux files into a directory outside Dropbox, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/96767/mactex-aux-directory-dir – homocomputeris Oct 20 '21 at 09:14
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The problem you're going to run into is going to come from simultaneous editing of the file. Most text editors do a poor job of checking for changed files on disk for a file that you're editing. I have no reason to believe that TeXstudio will do better in this respect.

That said, because TeX source files are just plain text, they're a good target for using version control. As long as you're not making changes to the same lines, the merging of changes will be pretty smooth. git is the most commonly used version control software around these days, and while many git users use Github as their host, there's no reason that it needs to be (and it could even be managed peer-to-peer although if you're new to version control that might be a bit more of a challenge than you want). Getting started with version control is a bit more than I can get into, but googling git tutorial should give you some good pointers, and I think it's not too difficult to set up a shared and private repository on github or gitlab.

Don Hosek
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