Brilliant! this opens up for collaborative LaTex files generation online.
I ported LaTeX to Javascript
11–20 of 73 posts
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#12Promising. I am getting some error messages though. lstat(/bin) failed ... /bin : No such file or directory warning: kpathsea: configuration file texmf.cnf not found in these directories:
These errors are save to ignore. You have to wait some seconds until compiling has completed. Note that the browser might prevent the website from opening the PDF (Pop-up blocking)
Yup, had to wait a bit, then enable popups from GitHub [Iceweasel 10.0.12, Debian Wheezy].
Would a download button appearing when the pdf has compiled be harder to do?
Nice demo
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#13Awesome! I looked at this approach for https://www.writelatex.com (which does the LaTeX editing in the browser but compiles on the server), but I didn't get very far with it. It would be interesting to read more about how it works / obstacles you had to overcome.
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#14Some background would be nice. Wasn't LaTeX notoriously hard to port – to the point that a LateX app for iPad actually ran in an emulator initially [1]. Is this port based on web2c as well? [1] http://www.litchie.com/?p=419
This looks like emscripten to me
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#15Wow, I really would like to know how this was achieved...
Note that it is somewhat broken for me: http://imgur.com/twIG75m
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#16Nice, but this constantly crashes Safari when the content goes below the fold. The whole page goes white and then the browser dies.
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#17This is awesome. Care to share some details on the implementation?
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#18Some background would be nice. Wasn't LaTeX notoriously hard to port – to the point that a LateX app for iPad actually ran in an emulator initially [1]. Is this port based on web2c as well? [1] http://www.litchie.com/?p=419
Nevertheless it's a good effort as a proof of concept.
I'd also appreciate info on whether Latex packages will be supported in the future. At the moment this does not seem to be the case, though I can imagine this would be a challenging problem to solve for in-browser compilation of documents.
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#19Fun demo, but I can't get the .pdf back right now!
This is awesome but I also had a problem with viewing the file in the browser. What worked was opening it in a tab and then saving the page as a pdf.
Firefox 18.0
Re: I ported LaTeX to Javascript
#20Thanks for your hints! I added a 'Open PDF' button to circumvent popup blockers.
Yes, I used emscripten to port it to Javascript. It was not that hard. Emscripten had three bugs I had to fix (the hardest was to find that the %g format was not supported by emscripten's sscanf).
But it was compiled almost like for x86: first convert the pdftex 'web' souce code to c using web2c, then compile it to LLVM bytecode and the LLVM bytecode to JS.