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RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

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

#81

Post by queuebert »

ajkjk wrote: post #50
ngriffiths wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Well -- TeX is "80s good". We've gotten better at designing ergonomic software since and it really doesn't meet the modern standard. But it's good enough for most people, and sufficiently hard to replace, that it has stuck around. Added to that, academics specifically are more willing to suffer old crufty stuff than software engineers tend to be. After all their job is to absorb fields of material whether good or bad…

> TeX is "80s good"

Bingo. Compared to troff and what preceded, TeX was amazing just in its usage. But its real value was in the quality of its typesetting. Knuth put a lot of effort into the beauty and historical correctness of the output, so much so that it was solving optimization problems to calculate line breaks. MS Word still can't break a line properly in 2026.

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

#82

Post by alphabeta3r56 »

ngriffiths wrote: post #27
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

The dichotomy comes from conflating the TeX syntax with tex macro system, both use backslash.

The backslash based syntax allows for some really powerful typesetting which is far above anything that exists today. At the same time, the use of backslash-based langauge right to the bottom in terms of macros is what is causing the frustration.

Typst kind of solves that by having backslash based syntax implemented in Rust.

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

#83

Post by davrosthedalek »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #35
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

Latex is used because writing math in latex is very good, and despite how everything else (like tables and figures) is so bad. That's why people take the math subset of latex and use it in other contexts - exactly like this product.

I agree that tables are not great, but figures? Seems to work pretty well, better than word for sure.

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

#84

Post by scuppernong »

tcfhgj wrote: post #66
scuppernong wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as long as the arXiv doesn't accept Typst, it's never going to be a real alternative to LaTeX. and the arXiv maintainers seem either hostile or indifferent to Typst

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZlAbCOjd8 doesn't appear indifferent or hostile

haven't watched it but my only data point for that claim is this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1dcu3p8/i_contacted_...

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

#85

Post by westurner »

nicoburns wrote: post #24
DominikPeters wrote: post #3

The landing page (clearly to a large part written by LLM) does not mention that both KaTeX and mathjax can render to SVG in node. This wasm approach might still be lighter, but the advantage is not as clear as the page makes it seem. (It also contains LLM dishonesties like that the bundle size is 0 KB.)

Where this clearly wins is native rendering use cases where there is no browser or JS engine involved at all.

A sphinxdoc ratex Makefile task for building from .rst and .md doctrees to PDF?

There are probably enough tests for a Rust rewrite of docutils and sphinx with Python extension compatibility; docutils.rs and sphinxdoc.rs?

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

#86

Post by whyenot »

Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

I have been (and still am, I guess) a big LaTeX fan. I wrote a flora in LaTeX, with the idea that it would be a "living document" that I could update easily. That was a mistake. LaTeX really is very brittle. My flora no longer makes it through typesetting without erroring out, and trying to figure out what is going wrong takes so much time (not the first time I have had to deal with this). My idealism got ahead of practicality. Looking back, I should have used Word and InDesign; that combo would have prevented so many headaches and been more stable.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

ngriffiths wrote: post #27
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by contingencies »

Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

Meh. For cross-platform, low hassle, just use LyX + XeTeX + decent fonts. Once you learn how to do the commonly annoying things (alignment; indices; pages without footers; custom footers; etc. - AI is good), you can achieve all of them. You will positively loathe using conventional word processing after a short while. https://www.lyx.org/

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

#89

Post by lejalv »

ajkjk wrote: post #50
ngriffiths wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Well -- TeX is "80s good". We've gotten better at designing ergonomic software since and it really doesn't meet the modern standard. But it's good enough for most people, and sufficiently hard to replace, that it has stuck around. Added to that, academics specifically are more willing to suffer old crufty stuff than software engineers tend to be. After all their job is to absorb fields of material whether good or bad…

If TeX is “80s good”, Typst might be “90s” good, being generous.

Celebrating batch-mode typesetting in 2026 feels like some weird cyberpunk fixation.

Programmable like Emacs (but via Scheme), interfaced with major Computer Algebra Systems, tree-structured documents that are live-queryable and modifiable, and typesetting that rivals TeX without using TeX - TeXmacs provides all that, and much more (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html)

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

#90

Post by ethmarks »

tabbott wrote: post #6

It's interesting to me that the page doesn't describe the size of the rust binary (relevant for mobile app use cases where you would need to add the Rust binary to your app) or performance. The webpage also does read like it was at least heavily LLM assisted, which makes it a bit hard to trust it. That all said, this is definitely something I'd be interested in using for Zulip if is indeed going to be a well maintain…

> the size of the rust binary

The `render` binary weighed 4.0 MB on disk when I compiled it a few minutes ago. Not sure if that's what you were looking for, but just in case it is, there you go.

Here's the logs, if you want: https://gist.github.com/ethmarks/8df92a68c3076ea2f4a5aedba9f...

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