What Scissor LaTeX does differently
Scissor LaTeX runs the whole editor in your browser tab. A typesetting engine written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly lays out real pages from your LaTeX as you type, on your device, with no server in between.
You do not create an account. Projects are kept in your browser on this device, and you can save a project to your own Google Drive, where Scissor LaTeX can see only the files it created or you opened with it. How it works
What you get in the editor
Pages in Latin Modern fonts with numbered sections, equations, figures and tables; a bibliography from your .bib files in 17 citation styles; 36 templates (Blank, Research paper, Article, Report, Thesis, Homework, Lab report, Letter, CV, Envelope, Postcard, Business card, Poster, Certificate, Flyer, and 21 look-alike conference formats in the style of IEEE, CVPR, ACM sigconf, Springer LNCS, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL and the arxiv.sty preprint style, which are not official and not affiliated with or endorsed by these organisations); comments, an outline, a symbol palette and a citation picker; and export as PDF, a .zip of the project, the main .tex file, HTML or Markdown. About the editor
Who Scissor LaTeX suits
Students writing homework, lab reports and a thesis, and researchers drafting a paper on their own, who want to see the pages while they write and keep their files private. Because the editor keeps working offline after the first visit (open it online once after each update), it also suits a train or a library with poor Wi-Fi. Open the editor
When Overleaf is the better choice
Scissor LaTeX does not replace Overleaf in every case. Overleaf is the better choice when:
- You write with co-authors and want to edit the same document at the same time.
- Your document needs TeX packages or document classes beyond what Scissor LaTeX supports, or it must be compiled with TeX for a publisher.
- You want a journal's or a conference's official template from Overleaf's template gallery.
Moving a project from Overleaf
- In Overleaf, download your project's source as a .zip file.
- Open the Scissor LaTeX editor and, on the start screen, choose Open .tex or .zip files and pick the .zip file.
- Its .tex, .bib and image files are unpacked, folders included, and the file with \documentclass becomes the main file. If it picks the wrong one, choose Typeset this file on the right file in the Files panel.
- Read through the pages and the Problems tab for anything the editor does not support.
Commands from packages the editor does not support may be left out or reported as problems, so check the pages before you hand in your work.