Meet the TeXperts! Introducing Lian Tze and Nicholas

As those of you who've contacted us with support requests in the past few months will have discovered, we now have a team of TeXperts on hand to answer your all LaTeX and Overleaf questions! Our two leading TeXperts are Lian Tze Lim and Nicholas Reith, and they've both been doing fantastic work in responding to support requests and producing tutorials and example materials for the community.

So, without further ado, please say a big hello to our two TeXperts!

About Lian Tze Lim

I live in Penang, Malaysia with my husband and our daughter, where I teach at KDU College Penang. I received my B.Sc.(Hons) in Computer Science from Warwick University, where I also had my first encounter with LaTeX. After returning to Malaysia, I later obtained my M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing at Universiti Sains Malaysia and Multimedia University respectively. It was during my Master studies that I started using LaTeX extensively. Since then, I've created thesis LaTeX classes and templates for several Malaysian universities, as well as themes for Beamer presentations and posters, most of which I've also published in the Overleaf gallery.

"From now on whenever I see frogs I'll think of beautiful documents!"
- Said to Lian Tze at her recent seminar using our popular starting template.

I've conducted LaTeX-related trainings, in addition to providing consultation services on several projects, including for the Linux Foundation, Consumers International and Al-Andalus Consulting. I've put up my LaTeX-related work at http://liantze.penguinattack.org/latextypesetting.html, if anyone is interested. I also write for the Malaysian LaTeX Users blog, though I'm not writing as regularly as I like to these days!

Providing community support as an Overleaf TeXpert has been a great experience -- it's all of exciting, invigorating and humbling. A support request that sticks in my mind is to make Overleaf support pTeX, a LaTeX format for Japanese documents which many journals there use. I'm pretty chuffed that I managed to find a way -- you can read about it here.

About Nicholas Reith

Nicholas became a resident TeXpert at Overleaf (then WriteLaTeX) in October 2014. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is writing his dissertation, entitled “Tunisia’s Arab Spring: The Local Process of Revolution in Global Perspective.”

Nicholas has previous degrees from NYU and Georgetown University, was a Fulbright Scholar in Damascus, Syria, and spent five years working in international development with the United Nations Development Programme, located in, or focusing on the Middle East. As he moves in MS-Word dominated spheres, Nicholas only began learning LaTeX in 2013. But his TeX love and quick apprenticeship were born out of his past language experiences with Arabic, French and Spanish. He continues trying to convert his social science friends and collaborators, and he really loves to solve problems. So don’t hesitate to send him yours!

To help users debug their LaTeX errors more easily, Nicholas recently put together a Tips and Tricks for Troubleshooting LaTeX article, which provides a step-by-step guide to finding the cause of the error and resolving it as quickly as possible! He's also created this article template (with the best title ever!), which includes features such as s a cover page, line-numbering, draft watermarks, word count, and highlighting and commenting capabilities.

If you'd like to get involved...

If you'd like to help others and grow the LaTeX community, please consider applying to be an Overleaf Advisor -- it comes with some perks (including a free Overleaf Pro+ account!), and we'll also help support your outreach efforts where we can. We also have job openings from time to time which are posted on our jobs page, and we're always happy to hear from anyone interested in joining the Overleaf team -- so please do get in touch!