Publishing templates and examples in the Overleaf Gallery

Introduction

The Overleaf Gallery is a publicly accessible collection of templates arising from various sources, including official templates from publishers and institutions, as well as contributions from Overleaf staff and the wider LaTeX community. For projects that aren’t suitable for the Gallery, we suggest some alternative ways of sharing them.

Note: If you’re looking for more information on how to submit to one of our publishing partners, you can find that in this related article.

Templates suitable for the Overleaf Gallery

The Gallery is intended for the following templates types but Overleaf reserves the right to accept templates outside of these categories:

• Official templates for scientific journals, proceedings series etc. These templates must link to the official journal or publisher website containing the style guidelines or submission instructions.
• Official university templates for theses, reports, letters and presentations. These templates must link to the university’s website with the style guidelines or submission instructions.
• Official conference submission templates. These templates must link to the conference website, conference submission guidelines and/or call for papers.
• Basic templates for standard and common LaTeX document classes. We advise that new submissions of this type are rarely accepted because the Gallery already has numerous examples.
• Templates for less common document types, provided they have a wide interest.

We may also accept templates requested by our institutional and other partners, in addition to updates to their existing templates.

We do not accept the following templates types:

• Non-official templates for journals and proceedings series.
• Non-official templates for university-based documents such as theses, reports, letters and presentations.
• Templates that are a minimal modification of an existing or standard template.
• Templates that do not meet our quality criteria.

We also do not accept a template if:

• It contains personally identifiable information other than authorship/attribution data. This means that CVs, resumes, personal statements etc. are not acceptable. Templates should always use dummy text to demonstrate their features.
• The title isn’t descriptive. In particular, if it contains many abbreviations.
• The template’s description does not link to the relevant official website where it is expected to do so.
• It has a very limited use.
• It is a CV/resume template.
• It appears to be a work in progress or otherwise incomplete; or it is a complete work, such as a preprint article.
• It violates our acceptable use policy; in particular, if the template includes files licensed in a way that’s incompatible with the Gallery.
• It is a template similar to others in the Gallery.
• It is an update to an existing template but uses the wrong project; in which case, the original project needs to be updated and resubmitted.
• An alternative method of sharing would be recommended, such as activity sheets and homework assignments for students.
• The project description or template itself contains promotional, advertising, campaigns of any nature.

Due to the extremely high volume of template submissions, and the resources required to process them, Overleaf may not have time to respond to you in cases where we reject a template and we may not provide the precise reason for the rejection. Thanks for understanding.

How to submit a project to the Overleaf Gallery

Here’s a short video showing how to submit your project to the Overleaf Gallery:

How to update a published template

To update a published template, you must edit the original project you submitted to the Gallery and resubmit it using the steps shown in the video above. Changes to your original project will not affect the published Gallery template until you resubmit it and Overleaf approves the update(s). Only then will the new version replace the old one—this safeguard prevents accidental modifications to Gallery items. If the template’s description is formatted using HTML, please do not remove the HTML code on resubmission of the template.

When you submit a project to the Overleaf Gallery, the published template is based on the version at the time of submission. Please do not submit updates using a different project; such submissions will be rejected.

In general, we approve updates to existing templates, even if the template does not conform to our current policies.

Other ways to share templates, examples and completed works

In many cases, the Overleaf Gallery isn’t the easiest or most appropriate mechanism for sharing your templates and examples. We’ve put together the following suggestions based on certain types of projects we often see submitted to the Gallery.

Copying a link-shared project

Recommended for homework assignments, letter templates, report templates etc., and for personal templates.

If you are looking to provide a simple LaTeX document as an activity sheet for your students, or to distribute homework/assignment problems for your class, you can switch on link sharing and share the read-only link with your students for them to copy the project.

You can find more information on these two steps (sharing, and copying) in the following help articles:

• Sharing a project
• Making a copy of a project

Please be aware that any changes made to the project are immediately visible to those who have access to the project via the read-only link.

For a personal template or a template with just a few intended users, you can keep link-sharing switched off and share it directly with those who should have access, as Viewers.

Using the Overleaf API

Recommended for unofficial thesis templates and other templates already available to download outside the Overleaf Gallery.

We provide an API for starting a new project with specific contents. This is particularly useful if the template is available as a ZIP file (or a bunch of individual files) with a permanent URL. This is documented at https://www.overleaf.com/devs.

Here are some examples using GitHub’s raw.githubusercontent.com:

• using the entire contents of a Github repo via the downloadable .zip: https://github.com/liantze/pocketmod.sty/wiki

• using selected files from a Github repo: https://github.com/liantze/beamerthemeMirage/wiki

Completed homework assignments

If you’re a student and are looking to submit or hand in your homework or assignment, please be aware that submitting to the Overleaf Gallery will not submit your homework to your course! Please check the course guidelines and instructions, or contact your teacher, if you’re unsure how or where to submit your homework.

Preprints or other completed works

We don’t accept preprints or other completed works to the Overleaf Gallery. If you wish to publish a completed work from Overleaf, we recommend using an appropriate third-party destination for your work. In the case of preprints or other research outputs, this could be one of the many preprint servers that now support different disciplines (such as the arXiv or bioRxiv), or alternatively via a more general publishing platform such as Figshare.