RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#111

Post by Terretta » Tue, May 12, 2026, 11:34 AM UTC

azverev wrote: post #9

Pixel-diff CI against a golden suite is the right discipline for layout libraries, and it's noticeably rare in the JS ecosystem. Most "matches KaTeX" claims I've seen in the wild rely on screenshot eyeballing, which collapses on edge cases like spacing primes, integral subscripts, and matrix delimiters that scale. One thing I'd be curious about: how are font fallbacks handled when the same Rust core ships to platform…

In this case it doesn't eyeball same as it scores itself It self scores:

  157 \char"263a

as strong, while left is black circle smiley and right is full color emoji.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#112

Post by eddieh » Tue, May 12, 2026, 8:41 PM UTC

sombragris wrote: post #108

eddieh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the memoir class made LaTeX worse. The titlesec package is more customizable, easier to use, and reduced the size of the preamble significantly.

That's if you need to customize headings. I usually can keep using the standard ones, so that's not my case, and I suspect this also applies to a lot of people.

Customizing chapter styles, page styles, and headings was my sole reason for using the memoir class. I'm probably in the minority, that's true.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#113

Post by necovek » Wed, May 13, 2026, 3:26 AM UTC

electroly wrote: post #107

necovek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find it easier to align tables with numbers in TeX on the decimal point than in anything else. How is this even achieved with HTML or Word? Eg. variable width numbers like 4.53 13.98765 7 -1,000,234.76 Not perfect in TeX either, but at least possible.

In Word you add a decimal tab stop to the ruler. Word's main problem is that people are unaware of its features; they don't spend time learning it like they do with TeX. https://imgur.com/jipZ90B

Thanks, yeah, I haven't heard of it before even though it seems to have existed forever.

To your point, I guess that is an issue with WYSIWYG tools: if not discoverable, you assume it is not there.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#114

Post by TheRealPomax » Sun, May 17, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

red_trumpet wrote: post #65

TheRealPomax wrote: post #54

I am so confused. There's already a native version of LaTeX... it's... it's LaTeX. Why would a Rust implementation need to match KaTeX instead of properly implementing a real (and modern, so unicode-out-of-the-box) TeX engine, that LaTeX (which is a set of convenience macros) then trivially runs on top of?

Btw, the unicode-out-of-the-box version of LaTeX is called LuaLaTeX and ships with TeX Live.

I think you'll find XeTeX (with XeLaTeX because no sane person uses plain TeX except for package authors of course ;) predates LuaTeX by almost a decade.

(Something I ran into in 2008 when I was writing a multilingual book and heard about LuaTeX, only to find out it was still extremely incomplete and was roadmapped to not be done until 2012. And I couldn't wait 4 years)