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- Hacker News
- Pretty funny that there is both an installation and that its not cross platform. What is the point of web assembly again?by casey2
- > Due to the way Bibtex works, you may need to compile at least three times to see correct reference numbers in the PDF.
I'm not sure I understand why the second or third compile would work, but not the first.
by christoff12 - In latex, I have to compile once so that it can find out the references it needs, then bibtex so that it extracts the actual references, compile a second time to get the references into the paper and then a third time because a ton of things shift around and now it knows all the figure/page numbers etc.by exe34
- It is not 3 compiles of the same code after another, but e.g. latex, bibtex, latex, with each step creating part of the final output. I imagine latex like part of multi-pass compiler, so calling latex once is like running only one stage of the compiler. Latexmk (https://www.ctan.org/pkg/latexmk) solves this problem more elegantly by knowing how often each tool and in what order is required.by teh64
- There are Latex documents whose output keeps changing no matter how many times you run Latex on them: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requi...by fph
- This talk contains a really good explanation of this problem (and also discussion around how it's solved in Typst) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWWVhbyOWWEby nicoburns
- Here is also one based on the tectonic latex engine: https://github.com/nl5887/tectonic-wasmby nl5874
- I might be interested in running this offline too. Every time I try to do anything with LaTeX it pulls gigabytes of stuff but it's somehow still not batteries-included. I'm assuming this distribution is a bit more curated and out-of-the-box.by andai
- I really hope it can get LuaTeX support at some point, and SVG output added back in (although it hasn't been updated in two years, so it might be up to me). I have a project where this would solve a big problem if it had both of those. TikZJax might solve it better but it also doesn't support LuaTeX either and it feels like a bigger ask.by gs17
- > LaTeX Engines in Browsers
This is hillarious. Browsers lost the ability to print some 10 years ago. Today, printing a web page is an exercise in masochism.
I am very curious how the output will look like.
by hulitu - Is anyone else where familiar with MathML[1] and tried using it place of LaTeX?
Obviously not a replacement for all usecase of the above package (like rendering existing documents), but I use mostly for rendering math here and there in my own notes, I prefer it as I can render math without any dependencies, some examples here [2].
That said I'm my own user and mostly view it the same browser, but I've heard there are inconsistencies in rendering in different browsers.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/MathML
[2] https://akst.io/notes/?app=unsw.3202.07#uc-widget-0-title-13
by akst - Add LuaLaTeX and you're cookin' with gas. For real would be fantastic if we could get more or less the full LaTeX ecosystem readily and rapidly available online and in a huge variety of desktop applications.by joshjob42
- Please no. LaTeX and its ecosystem needs to be put out to pasture.by jampekka
- I’m really glad the main AI chatbot apps and sites support latex rendering. I tuned my system prompts to get the bots to explain their high level reasoning in equations for me to read if they think it will convey more nuance or dimensionality than casting down to English.by kridsdale1
- I'm looking forward to run Lua inside Latex inside Javascript inside Firefox inside my Android ART virtual machine.by fph
- https://www.swiftlatex.com/editor.html for the wysiwyg editor says "We are working hard to fix the editor." It has said this for many years. I think I tried it once when it was live and it was pretty cool. My guess is people observed it could corrupt documents, so it was taken down.by williamstein
- Is this related to web2js[1], which has been around for a while? It compiles the pascal code of TeX to wasm.
It looks like the live demo is no longer up, but it did run latex in the browser and render the dvi output to html. The wasm for TeX is about 495kb / 88kb compressed, but the memory image for LaTeX was a bit larger.
by dunham - I immediately received the following error :|
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.21 (SwiftLaTeX PDFTeX 0.3.0) (preloaded format=swiftlatexpdftex) I can't find the format file `swiftlatexpdftex.fmt'!
Likewise for XeTeX
by stschaef - Same.by kridsdale1
- Over the years many people have hypothesized that once WASM was really mature, it would become practical to fix the issues with web browser layout by sending down custom layout machines to users.
I would find it hilarious if LaTeX turned into a leader in that space. I doubt it could hold on to that. There's a lot of things that something designed from the beginning for web-like uses could probably improve on that would be capable of overcoming LaTeX. But I could see a world where it carves out a niche and holds on to that niche for a long period of time.
by jerf - I use LaTeX daily and hate it with a passion. I kinda lost all hope when ArXiv decided to do the HTML support by hacking a LaTeX to HTML conversion.
We already have a very powerful layouting engine: the web browser. The only missing piece is printing/pagination, for which there was some CSS Paged Media progress, but that stalled.
However, why the hell are we even doing paged media? For screen viewing it's strictly worse, and very few people print papers anymore. And even for those HTML pages print passably enough.
by jampekka - Hard to imagine anything worse than LaTeX for web layout. Imagine resizing a page and waiting for the re-compilation of the whole page.
- Running layout in WASM is already practical. A good demo is https://www.nicbarker.com/clay
The things you can't do are things like expose an accessibility tree (without a dummy DOM), interact with the system IME, and access system fonts.
by nicoburns - I added DVI support to NCSA Mosaic back in 1993-94, believing it to be a better format for "rich" documents than HTML or PDF.
Nobody else seemed convinced :(