Since September 2025, Overleaf's free plan stops any compile that runs longer than 10 seconds. A short paper fits. A thesis with a few pgfplots figures, a bibliography and a table of contents often doesn't, and the error tends to show up in the last weeks before a deadline, when the document is at its longest. The paid plans raise the limit to four minutes. The other way out is to compile the same project on your own computer, where nothing stops the build at 10 seconds.
The walkthrough below uses the LaTeX tab in the osFoundry desktop app, which runs a TeX engine called Tectonic on the computer itself. The same project also compiles with a regular TeX Live install and latexmk; the steps are about moving the project out of Overleaf without breaking it. The thesis in the screenshots is a sample, with four chapters, two pgfplots charts, a TikZ diagram and a .bib file.
Download the whole project, not just the PDF
In Overleaf, open the project, click Menu, and under Download choose Source. That ZIP holds main.tex, every chapter file, the bibliography and any images, in the same folders as in the editor. Downloading files one by one is how a \input{chapters/results.tex} ends up pointing at nothing.
In the desktop app, open a note, add a LaTeX tab with the plus button, and click Import ZIP. The app looks for main.tex (or the first .tex file if there is no file by that name), keeps the folder structure under it, and lists the rest as project files. It refuses ZIPs with absolute paths or .. in them, and the project is capped at 100 files and 20 MB, which is plenty for text and plots but can be tight for a thesis full of high-resolution photos.
Compile, and jump to the error
Click Compile. The first build is the slow one: Tectonic doesn't ship a full TeX distribution, and instead downloads the packages and fonts the document actually uses. For this thesis that came to about 430 files and 46 MB, kept in a cache for every later build.
The sample project has a typo, \texbf instead of \textbf, of the kind Overleaf's editor would have underlined. The build stops, and the build log lists it as chapters/results.tex line 50: Undefined control sequence. Clicking that line opens the chapter file at line 50.
That saves more time than it sounds. Plain TeX logs report the error inside whichever \input file it happened in, and with four chapters the hard part is often finding which file is meant.
Fix it and compile again
After the fix, the full build ran in about 15 seconds on an M1 Mac: three TeX passes plus a BibTeX run, because the citations and the table of contents need the previous pass's output before they can be filled in. Tectonic reruns by itself until nothing changes, so there's no need to press Compile two or three times as with plain pdflatex. On Overleaf's free plan, the same project would have been stopped at 10 seconds. The desktop build has a limit of its own, three minutes, so a build stuck in a loop still ends.
Where the 15 seconds go, and how to get a thesis back under 10 if you'd rather stay on Overleaf, is mostly a question of the plots. In this project, the two charts and the diagram account for about 9 of the 15 seconds.
Export the PDF
The PDF button saves the compiled file next to the note, in the app's folder on your computer, and the Project ZIP button packs the edited sources back into a ZIP that Overleaf can import again. That second part matters if a supervisor or co-author still works in Overleaf: edit locally while the deadline is close, then upload the ZIP as a new project.
The notes the LaTeX tab lives in are described on the page for osFoundry's notes and research workspace. The app is free from the osFoundry download page for macOS, Windows and Linux.
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