Thank you for your article. I’m the primary author for a paper I’m writing, along with thousands of lines of statistical programming code. I came here because I’m trying to figure out if I should expect a co-author to create a branch for themselves, for them to create pull-requests from. And, if my co-authors do use my GitHub repo, should I also only work in a branch?

I’m surprised you say LaTeX collaboration is difficult. Does a local LaTeX engine (on the local computer), with an offline LaTeX editor, not work?

If you don’t expect your co-authors to manage their own LaTeX editors on their computers, you will find it easier to encourage them to use Overleaf. For the files that get pulled in to the main TeX file, upload those to Overleaf in the same folder as the main TeX file, as an external URL. In Dropbox, you can source the latest version of the file by changing ?dl=0 at the end of the URL, to ?raw=1 . Those files should then be refreshed in Overleaf when there are changes.

This should work for the person who edits the respective files most often, and syncs that with their Dropbox cloud storage. The edits will come through at a slightly slower pace (through a GitHub pull), if somebody else commits changes to GitHub.

If you’re like me and you prefer an offline LaTeX editor, create a new GitHub repository, just for the paper. Subscribe to a paid Overleaf plan, then sync the Overleaf project with the GitHub repository. Syncing that to the GitHub repo will let you pull changes onto your computer, if you want to use your offline LaTeX engine. The files will need to be refreshed in Overleaf if you want to update them, then pulled via GitHub to your computer, if you want to compile the PDF yourself, on your own computer.