alt Hacker NewsLaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why is there no npm registry package?
> 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.
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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.