How to use Grammarly with Overleaf

If your Overleaf editor displays a three-way toggle between Source, Source (legacy) and Rich Text mode, please note that Grammarly is incompatible with the Source (legacy) mode:

Grammarly provides extensions for several browsers and we refer readers to Grammarly’s support pages for further information. You need to register for a Grammarly account after installing your preferred browser extension, shown here pinned to Chrome’s toolbar:

For present purposes, we assume you opted for the free Grammarly plan which offers a subset of Grammarly’s features.

You may wish to switch off Overleaf’s built-in spell check via the project’s Menu, to avoid potential conflicts with Grammarly’s suggestions:

The Grammarly extension will always check the file that’s currently open in the editor, and it will present itself at the bottom of the document:

The screenshot above shows the Grammarly icon indicating 5 suggestions for this text, an extract of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale copied from Project Gutenberg.

Performance issues

The Grammarly extension slows the Overleaf editor, sometimes causing noticeable delays when typing or scrolling—particularly on large documents. Similar delays may also occur when using “go to location”, searching or using the file tree. If you experience any of these issues whilst editing your project, we recommend temporarily disabling Grammarly and only re-enabling it when you want its suggestions and corrections.

How to temporarily disable Grammarly

1. Open an Overleaf project in your browser and make sure it is the currently active browser tab.
2. Select the Grammarly icon () located on your browser toolbar.
3. Make sure the overleaf.com domain is displayed in Grammarly’s menu.
4. Set the toggle switch to Off to disable Grammarly on overleaf.com

These steps are summarised in the following graphic:

Known limitations

In addition to the potential performance issues described above, our testing also highlighted the following points:

1. The Grammarly icon is located towards the bottom of the text, so it might be necessary to scroll down to the end of the file to see the icon.
2. Grammarly is unaware of LaTeX markup, occasionally resulting in erroneous suggestions and words not being spell-checked. For example, the text just after an opening brace { is not checked by Grammarly:



3. Last but not least, in some situations, the error count reported by the Grammarly extension might be underestimated, particularly for large documents.

Grammarly premium feature: Snippets

Premium Grammarly users have access to a “snippets” feature which, by default, is triggered using the backslash (\) character (as its shortcut). This feature could conflict with Overleaf’s autocomplete for LaTeX commands but, fortunately, the snippets shortcut character can be changed or disabled using advice from Grammarly support.