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Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

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Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#81

Post by TheRealPomax »

rubatuga wrote: post #41
TheRealPomax wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to give up on both: they seem great until your page needs more than 10 formulae and it starts to take quite a lot of seconds for your page to finish loading for folks. Instead I switched to preprocessing my pages to extract latexy blocks, literally run them through latex and pdf2svg to turn them into clean SVG image and replace the on-page latex code with presized elements: now your content doesn't jump around…

Do you have a repo by any chance?

I have many, many repos, but in this case we're talking https://github.com/pomax/Bezierinfo-2

Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#83

Post by shakna »

improbable22 wrote: post #37
TheRealPomax wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe have a look at XeLaTeX (the unicode-by-default LaTeX), which lets you just use any modern font you have installed, using normal syntax.

Does the arxiv accept xetex yet? That's one constraint which kept me away.

Officially? No.

> Anything that relies on something other than TeX or (PDF)LaTeX will fail. At this time arXiv does not support processing with: XeTeX and its variants including LuaTeX, LyX, or PDFTeX. [0]

However, you'll frequently see papers with:

> Comments: PDF file generated using XeLaTeX/XeTeX.

Such as [1], where the author would prefer submitting a PDF-only than jump through the hoops to make it work under standard LaTeX.

[0] https://arxiv.org/help/faq/mistakes

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4830

Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#84

Post by ncmncm »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #30
jjice wrote: post #6

I hated the look of LaTeX documents when I first started university, especially the font. I don't know what happened, but I eventually fell in love Computer Modern. Something about it just looks great. Maybe it's just Stockholm Syndrome.

Same, except instead of falling in love with Computer Modern, I went "oh hey, XeLaTeX lets me use fonts in a sane way" and started typesetting with modern OpenType fonts instead. So I'd argue there's at least a good chunk of Stockholm syndrome there.

Same. I particularly like Linux Libertine, enough so that I make Firefox use it everywhere, even (especially?) where the page designer wanted sans.

Sadly, mobile Firefox does not support that, so HN on Android is relentlessly sans.

Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#85

Post by sneak »

conjectures wrote: post #39
jjice wrote: post #6

I hated the look of LaTeX documents when I first started university, especially the font. I don't know what happened, but I eventually fell in love Computer Modern. Something about it just looks great. Maybe it's just Stockholm Syndrome.

I think it's because the font is correlated with higher-than-average quality for random docs one finds on the web.

This psychological baggage was precisely why I chose it for body copy on my blog. It’s a sort of an intellectual dogwhistle.

Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#87

Post by elSidCampeador »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #32
elSidCampeador wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Computer Modern till I read your post. Now I wanna move to Fourier for good - thanks for that!

Maybe have a look at XeLaTeX (the unicode-by-default LaTeX), which lets you just use any modern font you have installed, using normal syntax.

I use XeLaTeX! Just wasn't aware of Fourier and Utopia.

Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#88

Post by gwern »

One bit of irony: LaTeX.css can't display math without... JS.

(However, there is a solution if you're using Pandoc! Compile via texmath and then https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node can create a static HTML+CSS+fonts page, which aside from looking the same, runs far faster than loading Mathjax. This is what I do on gwern.net. It's very nice. texmath doesn't support all of LaTeX, of course, but if you need a block or a diagram, there's lots of Pandoc plugins to call a TeX install of some sort and generate an SVG or PNG.)

Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#89

Post by dhosek »

jfk13 wrote: post #57
DavidVoid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it's much too thin and therefore hard to read on computer screens. I'm sure it looks great on paper printed with the old Xerox laser printers that were around when it was made, but in its current form it's just way too thin to be read on a screen. Someone on a German forum made a wider version of it which (imo) looks much better [1]. [1] https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-computer-m…

My recollection is that Computer Modern didn't look very good on old laser printers, as their resolution just wasn't high enough to handle the detail of the glyphs. It was crafted for digital phototypesetting systems with a resolution of 1200dpi or more, and 300dpi laser printers couldn't do it justice.

It depended on the laser printer. It's funny that the poster mentioned Xerox laser printers in particular because cm looked especially bad on them: There were two competing approaches to laserprinting. One was write black where a laser was used to add charge to the parts of the drum that should be black. The other (used by Xerox and perhaps others) was write white where the whole drum was charged and the laser was used to remove charge from the parts that should be white. In either case, the pixel was a little bigger than the actual 1/300in x 1/300in square that was to be drawn so it resulted in CM coming out even more spindly on write white laser printers. Neenie Billawalla came up with a modification to the MF source code for CM to allow for increasing the darkness of the fonts as well as some other fine-tuning. (https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17billawala.pdf)

As I recall, there were occasional other issues with running MF on the CM sources at low resolutions and it was often necessary to just tell MF to continue at the error prompt to generate the font (when Tom Rokicki's dvips incorporated auto-running MF to generate missing PK files for specific resolutions, I think it ran it with a default setting of ignoring errors).

Those 1980s Xerox laser printers were real beasts. The 87xx/97xx series printers were prone to rolling over (crashing) on TeX print jobs since downloading fonts to the printer was not fully supported. The first dvi driver for the Xerox printers actually required pre-installing font sets on the printer and only certain combinations of fonts could appear in a single document. I don't think the 27xx series printers were ever capable of handling TeX output.

Re: Show HN: LaTeX.css – Make your website look like a LaTeX document

#90

Post by dhosek »

bmitc wrote: post #42
jjice wrote: post #6

I hated the look of LaTeX documents when I first started university, especially the font. I don't know what happened, but I eventually fell in love Computer Modern. Something about it just looks great. Maybe it's just Stockholm Syndrome.

I disliked Computer Modern enough that after experimenting with various free fonts, I actually purchased Michael Spivak's MathTime Professional 2 Complete fonts, and then I use a nice Times-like font. https://pctex.com/mtpro2.html

Michael Spivak absolutely loathes CM. I remember trying to make the case for at least a few characters of the design to him poolside during one of the 80s TUG conferences and he wasn't having it.
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