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

latex.now.sh

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

#41

Post by rubatuga »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #34
doerig wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I really don't know. MathJax has been very janky for some reason. I have tried using KaTeX ( https://katex.org ) but couldn't get it to work properly and some equations just looked "off".

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?

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

#42

Post by bmitc »

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

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

#45

Post by chrismorgan »

DavidVoid wrote: post #23
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.

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…

I strongly agree on the “too thin” point. On screen I find it an awful font, almost as bad as half the 300-weight sans-serifs too many people love to use on their websites. Computer Modern does look better printed, especially on less-accurate printers that thicken what they print.

Related: the serif font Equity comes in two grades to compensate for such types of printers (though both grades are thicker than Computer Modern), and discusses the rationale for this feature: https://mbtype.com/pdf/equity-type-specimen.pdf#page=5

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

#46

Post by mixedmath »

scythmic_waves wrote: post #25

Why do some of the equations show up as rendered by MathJax, but others still read `$\mathbb{R}$`?

The reason this is happening here is because the customization telling mathjax to regard `$...$` as an inline equation occurs immediately after the script tag loading mathjax. Reordering these lines fixes this.

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

#47

Post by supernova87a »

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.

Very true -- interesting when the barrier to using the tool signifies a certain level of professionalism and investment in wanting the paper to look and read right.

However, there is a part of the curve where random failed grad student and retired professors become conspiracy cranks and email you half-baked theories about the shape of the universe, typeset in Latex -- and those get through the filter unfortunately.

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

#48

Post by romwell »

This is great!

Putting anything mathematics-related on the Web and making it look half-decent is such a chore. Thank you for making it easier!

MathJax and KaTeX are a great thing, but there's a contrast between formulas and the rest of the document unless you use something like this.

The comments here as of now fall into two groups:

- "Who needs it and why?"

People who want to present or discuss mathematics and proofs on the Web. If you ask, you're not one of them.

- "This does not exactly like LaTeX!"

Duh. It does not. Only TeX looks like TeX.

You know what else TeX does? It takes forever to compile, and the nice-looking result is a PDF that most people will be too lazy to download.

So, we have the ArXiV. And if your website is not the ArXiV, linking to PDFs is far from ideal. Static generation is a chore.

This is a compromise.

TL;DR: great work, much needed and appreciated

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

#49

Post by jdnier »

atrettel wrote: post #12
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 a lot of people go through a life cycle of Computer Modern. I originally was indifferent, but once I learned LaTeX I used it since it was the default and it signaled to people that I knew LaTeX. Now I prefer Utopia/Fourier instead. Computer Modern seems to "thin", in my opinion, but I still use it on occasion. Some colleagues of mine really love it, though. I can see why some people like it since it's the def…

Nice! https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/utopia-fouriermath/ I've been away from TeX/LaTeX typesetting for a long time. That's immediately appealing.
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