Shipping a LaTeX Compiler Behind an Edge App | Hacker News Reader

Shipping a LaTeX Compiler Behind an Edge App

bhargav.dev

13 pointsbrgv7 comments

Have you seen this one: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

It's TeX in wasm implemented by writing a pascal to wasm compiler, which seemed like a novel approach. (TeX is written in pascal and typically translated to C before building.)

TeX itself is a 500kb wasm file (compresses to 90k), but the images get much bigger with things like LaTeX pre-loaded.

(The author uses it to run tikz in a browser in this repository: https://github.com/kisonecat/tikzjax)

> (TeX is written in pascal and typically translated to C before building.)

Actually, TeX is written in WEB and can be "tangled" into different programming languages. It used to be tangled to Pascal originally, but nowadays ctangle produces C directly.

Once upon a time I hand-coded my résumé in Plain TeX, but on multiple occasions when applying for TeX composition jobs was asked for a Word .doc version by HR.

A few years later, when PDFs were more prevalent, I found out in an interview that the .pdf which I had sent in had been converted to plain text and then uploaded into a database of résumés and that it was essentially illegible due to issues with the encodings of the old-style figures, small caps, and ligatures which I had used.

Perhaps it would be helpful to ensure that the PDF is tagged so as to ensure that any automated processing results in a useful extraction of text?

I'm thinking of a (La)TeX myself, but more in the lines of eXTeX[0], as it is wirtten in Java. [0] https://github.com/tex-other/extex/tree/master

That's awesome. I hadn't come across eXTeX before. For my use case, the main constraint is compatibility with existing LaTeX CVs and their packages, fonts and assets, rather than the language the engine is written in. I'd be curious how far eXTeX gets with modern LaTeX documents in practice. Have you experimented with compiling real world templates with it?

I must first get it compile, the java source is very old, but as it adheres to the TeX-standard modern templates should not be a problem, except for those which ise lua, of course

> I'd be curious how far eXTeX gets with modern LaTeX documents in practice.

The LaTeX kernel requires some primitives [0] that are unlikely to be supported in a 15-year-old engine, so you probably won't be able to use any version of TeX Live newer than TL20.

[0]: https://texdoc.org/serve/ltnews31/0#section*.29

[1]: https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/keentype

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