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LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

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Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#11

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jerf wrote: post #5

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 wou…

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 :(

Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#12

Post by dunham »

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.

[1]: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#13

Post by nicoburns »

jerf wrote: post #8
nicoburns wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like it's fair to say that you have not "fixed the issues with browser layout" if you lose accessibility and input. System fonts I can live without, we can push our own, but those two things are a big deal. Even input you might be able to hack around but accessibility is a big deal and the "hack" at that point is nearly to both lay it out in the browser and the supposed "fixed" layout system, and while that ma…

I mean, I agree it's not fixed. I guess I'm just saying it's not the layout engine that's the blocker.

FWIW, I actually think it would be much more valuable just to fix the spec and make CSS layout fast-by-default.

Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#14

Post by LudwigNagasena »

jerf wrote: post #5

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 wou…

Hard to imagine anything worse than LaTeX for web layout. Imagine resizing a page and waiting for the re-compilation of the whole page.

Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#15

Post by jerf »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #14
jerf wrote: post #5

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 wou…

Hard to imagine anything worse than LaTeX for web layout. Imagine resizing a page and waiting for the re-compilation of the whole page.

That's part of the reason I'd find it so funny, yes.

The reason why I consider it a possibility is that LaTeX has two things out of the gate: The technical capability, and a small but arguably rabid user base. It's the sort of thing that can take an early lead but is quite unlikely to sustain it.

But you can't deny that LaTeX has had incredible staying power, despite the list of issues that everyone who uses it has with it.

Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#16

Post by kridsdale1 »

joshjob42 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#18

Post by gjvc »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #11
jerf wrote: post #5

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 wou…

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 :(

pretty sure I remember reading about this with excitement and wonder ...

Re: LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers

#20

Post by exe34 »

christoff12 wrote: post #19

> 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.

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.
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