600,000 users on Overleaf make over 2 billion edits!

We’re excited to announce that Overleaf now has over 600,000 registered users! And not only that… together you've made over 2 billion edits across all the projects you've worked on over the past 4 years. That's simply amazing!

For those of you wondering what 2 billion edits looks like, it's equivalent to around 11.5 billion pages compiled – so over four years we've compiled (on average) 100 pages each second! Or, to put it another way, if you printed off all of those pages and stacked them up, you'd have a pile 9,000km high – 1000 times the height of Mount Everest!

We've come a long way since it was just John Lees-Miller and I at the start of it all back in 2013... cue artistic shot of two explorers looking upwards on Mt. Everest – alas no, this isn't John and I :)

Photo by Lloyd Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link to original.

Overleaf CTO Dr John Lees-Miller interviewed for #DevWeek17

DeveloperWeek 2017 is the world’s largest developer expo and conference series with over 50 week-long events and dozens of city-wide partner events. The theme this year is, ‘The Industrial Revolution of Code’ – examining the ways in which code is revolutionizing the way we conduct business and ourselves.

To celebrate #DevWeek17, Digital Science – Overleaf's lead investor – are conducting a series of interviews of those involved in the development of new tools and innovations in the research space. Delighted to help kick things off, our very own Dr John Lees-Miller is up first! Here's his first answer; check out the original interview for the full set, including John's advice for those looking to break into the competitive world of software development.

Case Study - Purdue University - Graduate School improves thesis authoring and submission processes

The Purdue University Graduate School was evaluating tools and solutions that would address the following goals:

1. Make the thesis writing process easier for students.
2. Decrease the amount of time and work required by the Graduate School to review theses.
3. Streamline the thesis review process.

Providing premium Overleaf accounts and customized writing templates to all students, faculty and staff is helping the Purdue Graduate School achieve these goals.

Guest Post Feature: Edifix Converts Unstructured Bibliographies to BibTeX

Edifix is an exciting new solution that employs a unique and patented heuristic parsing system to analyze references and create structured data from unstructured, plain text bibliographies. It converts your reference list into a variety of formats, including BibTeX.