Hacks / Editing Overleaf Documents with Emacs

I am still in the process of writing a paper. As we’re now in the editing stage, my supervisor has requested that I edit in Overleaf directly, so that he can see my changes through the “tracked changes” feature of overleaf. Weirdly, the git integration does not support that feature and so I was left with having to leave emacs.

But, no! I’d rather spend ten hours to hack together an emacs integration for overleaf than spending just one minute in the overleaf editor. (Well this sentiment is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there are many things that make me want to stay in emacs.)

This feat was accomplished by reverse engineering the old version of socket.io overleaf useses and prodigious use of the network analyzer of Firefox. The strangest issue I encountered was the weird way Overleaf encodes unicode (too many bits per character, seems to be a MySQL thing). The stopgap solution I found is to actually call out to node.js and use the same bit of code that overleaf uses to decode:

process.stdout.write(decodeURIComponent(escape(process.argv[2])));

Anyhow, I wanted to write way more than this but as always I am too lazy! Check out the Git repo :).