Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Towards LaTeX in the Browser

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 68 posts

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#31

Post by beefhash »

gravypod wrote: post #4

Are there any other solutions to document typesetting with latex-like features? TeX is very obtuse for someone who hasn't been using it for a long time.

UNIX has been doing that for the past 40 years until AT&T ripped troff out of standard UNIX installations.

Look into groff and possibly heirloom doctools. It's fairly difficult to learn and the default macro packages on most installations may be somewhat difficult to come to terms with/adjust for your own needs. You're definitely expected to learn basic troff macros to hack up a macro package if needed. See also: http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/ and https://utroff.org/

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#32

Post by cryptonector »

moultano wrote: post #29
jdleesmiller wrote: post #11

(I'm a co-founder at Overleaf.com, which does collaborative 'LaTeX in the browser' in a different sense.) I like the idea of a 'sane' subset of LaTeX that is easy to publish to the web. There are tools like LaTeXML and TeX4ht that try to convert general LaTeX documents to (X)HTML, but it's a very hard problem. Some difficulties arise from the fact that TeX is just very hard to parse in general. Even the first stage o…

I really like the idea of adding math support to Unicode via combining characters. It's more complicated than anything Unicode currently deals with, but not that much more complicated, and the idea of being able to put math into anything that currently accepts strings is just so enticing. We should treat math as it's own language, and rendering it as we would any other human language with an unusual way of laying out…

Hmmm, certainly Unicode ought to be able to represent mathematics as a script like any other. However, the complexity involved is non-trivial. To make things easier, whatever Unicode might do for math should have a mapping to and from TeX or MathAJAX. In any case, Unicode is rather complex as it is; I'm not sure I look forward to this extra level of complexity :(

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#33

Post by Bromskloss »

moultano wrote: post #29
jdleesmiller wrote: post #11

(I'm a co-founder at Overleaf.com, which does collaborative 'LaTeX in the browser' in a different sense.) I like the idea of a 'sane' subset of LaTeX that is easy to publish to the web. There are tools like LaTeXML and TeX4ht that try to convert general LaTeX documents to (X)HTML, but it's a very hard problem. Some difficulties arise from the fact that TeX is just very hard to parse in general. Even the first stage o…

I really like the idea of adding math support to Unicode via combining characters. It's more complicated than anything Unicode currently deals with, but not that much more complicated, and the idea of being able to put math into anything that currently accepts strings is just so enticing. We should treat math as it's own language, and rendering it as we would any other human language with an unusual way of laying out…

It's an interesting idea. At what point, though, do we draw the line between what a character set (like Unicode) should handle, and what should be handled by a higher-level layer? I'm thinking that things like boldness, italicisation, and super script aren't really the job for a character set.

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#34

Post by abritinthebay »

I love the output of LaTeX but the language itself (and it’s dependencies and packages) are an absolute horror show.

I’ve never understood how people can learn be it so, writing it is painful, it’s tooling is abysmal, and it rarely seems to work except on the person who wrote its machine.

We’ve got to be able to do better.

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#35

Post by notthemessiah »

abritinthebay wrote: post #34

I love the output of LaTeX but the language itself (and it’s dependencies and packages) are an absolute horror show. I’ve never understood how people can learn be it so, writing it is painful, it’s tooling is abysmal , and it rarely seems to work except on the person who wrote its machine. We’ve got to be able to do better.

A task easier said than done.

Also, it should be considered that it's impossible to make breaking changes in the LaTeX language otherwise you lost the ability to compile a paper from 30 years ago.

But if you're trying to do something simple, I would say go for pandoc and use whatever format you're comfortable, then convert it to TeX: https://pandoc.org/

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#36

Post by lorenzhs »

globuous wrote: post #13
gravypod wrote: post #4

Are there any other solutions to document typesetting with latex-like features? TeX is very obtuse for someone who hasn't been using it for a long time.

I've been using org-mode and exporting it to HTML. Then making an @media(print) style sheet and exporting the HTML/printCSS to PDF through princeXML. It's been amazing. Latex equations are exported as pngs (for PDF export because I don't think prince does Mathjax, but org mode can export to mathjax). I have my bibliography with bibtex2html. And templating my pdfs becomes so much easier than with latex. It's just HTML…

Any particular reason why you don't use org-mode's latex export (org-latex-export-to-pdf / C-c C-e l p) directly? It will render math nicely, not as embedded images, etc.

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#37

Post by martyalain »

What do you think of this project {lambda way} as an alternative to LaTeX in a browser: http://lambdaway.free.fr

For instance, from this wiki page http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=oxford I could directly generate a PDF paper, http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/data/lambdatalk_20170728.p..., and slides, http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=oxford_slides

Some other pages in this workshop: http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=factory http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=NIL http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=teaching http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=lambdacode

Your comments are welcome.

Alain Marty

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#38

Post by badsectoracula »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #19
applecrazy wrote: post #2

I wonder if somebody has taken TeX and compiled to the browser in wasm using emscripten. That would be easier to port but heavy on load times. Edit: it exists! https://github.com/manuels/texlive.js/ is a limited port of LaTeX to JS, rendered to PDF

Classic TeX would be damn near useless in the age of Unicode, so you're looking at something like XeLaTeX or LUATex. The problem is that it's really easy to implement a really basic form of TeX, but unless you already planned for the really hard cases, maintaining your implementation is going to become intractible. TeX's real text typesetting is almost always woefully ignored even though _everything_ has to type beau…

> Classic TeX would be damn near useless in the age of Unicode

Unless you want to write in English, which i am going to bet it still has a somewhat large audience :-P

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#39

Post by yorwba »

Bromskloss wrote: post #33
moultano wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the idea of adding math support to Unicode via combining characters. It's more complicated than anything Unicode currently deals with, but not that much more complicated, and the idea of being able to put math into anything that currently accepts strings is just so enticing. We should treat math as it's own language, and rendering it as we would any other human language with an unusual way of laying out…

It's an interesting idea. At what point, though, do we draw the line between what a character set (like Unicode) should handle, and what should be handled by a higher-level layer? I'm thinking that things like boldness, italicisation, and super script aren't really the job for a character set.

Unicode already has 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝, 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤 and ˢᵘᵖᵉʳˢᶜʳⁱᵖᵗ variants of the Latin alphabet.

Re: Towards LaTeX in the Browser

#40

Post by patte »

I was wondering recently if/how it would be possible to piggybag latex’ georgous typesetting (place the letters) to bring justified-text to websites. I want to do a PoC for absolut positioning all letters of a basic document placed by tex for my screensize.

Did anyone ever see such an approach?

Post reply on HN