shoulder to shoulder

Today I got an uplifting email in an account I rarely use for registrations.  I'm not convinced this will rate as Good News for Modern Man for anyone I know, but it cheered ME up.  This, mind you, on a day marred by the Hardyesque twists of fate which technology has made so commonplace (and no, I DON'T want to talk about it).  Excerpt from cheering email:

Exciting News - ShareLaTeX is joining Overleaf!

We've got some exciting news — Overleaf and ShareLaTeX are joining forces, and we will be bringing our teams and services together as we continue to build the best tools for collaborative writing.



Over the past 4 years, both ShareLaTeX and Overleaf have gone from strength to strength — seeing rapid, sustained growth in usage — and have emerged as the two most popular online LaTeX editors. Our combined community comprises over two million authors at thousands of institutions and enterprises around the world. Naturally, we've always been compared and provided each other with some friendly competition, but behind the scenes, we've often been trying to figure out a way to work together.

Going forwards, our aim is to bring the best of both Overleaf and ShareLaTeX together in a way that benefits everyone. The ShareLaTeX team has done a fantastic job of building a truly real time collaborative LaTeX editing environment, including a great new tracked changes feature, intelligent help for common LaTeX errors, and amazing resources for learning LaTeX. The Overleaf team has at the same time been busy working on its WYSIWYG editing tools for users new to LaTeX and its partnerships with journals, publishers and publisher back-end systems that enable direct submission and streamlined editorial workflows for over 10,000 journals. By working together, we can finally avoid duplicating our efforts when we're both trying to achieve the same goals.

What does this mean for you as an Overleaf or ShareLaTeX user? No worries!  ...

I have watched both projects from afar - it should come as no surprise to learn that BOTH have Tufte templates - and it was really rather like reading about Scandinavian welfare systems.  Since they were already being all Scandinavian and helpful and empowering, it comes as no real surprise that they have decided to join forces.  But, still, awww....