Show HN: TeXbrain, a LaTeX editor that runs pdfTeX in the browser via WASM

71 points by swimmingbrain 7 hours ago on hackernews | 13 comments

Well done!

This is super cool. I wish there was something like this for ConTeXt too.

My project https://latex.to supports ConTeXt (plus all other TeX Live engines). Click + then New from showcase then ConTeXt to try it.

thangalin | 5 hours ago

I wrote a Markdown -> ConTeXt -> PDF editor that may interest you.

* https://keenwrite.com/

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

: kccqzy | 4 hours ago
Interesting. I usually use pandoc for converting my Markdown, which goes via LaTeX. Is there a specific reason you picked ConTeXt?

kccqzy | 5 hours ago

Does this work on Firefox or Safari? You say “Firefox or Safari fall back to a virtual filesystem” but somehow I can’t get this fallback to work. When I click New Project I just get a reminder to use Chrome or Edge. Is there a button to press to trigger the fallback?

zahrevsky | 5 hours ago

I'm on Safari, and it seems you can open your local LaTeX file to use the tool. It's an “Open file” button at the top.

Although I agree that it would be cool to have some hello-world example pre-opened.

: kccqzy | 4 hours ago
Ooh. That worked. Thanks.

kccqzy | 5 hours ago

I copy-pasted a random LaTeX doc from many years ago (I made sure I wrote it before 2020 so it did not use any new features not in TeX Live 2020), and upon compilation I got the error

    Font OT1/cmr/m/n/10.95=cmr10 at 10.95pt not loadable: Bad metric (TFM) file.

on line 13017. The document had only 200 lines so this must be from a package. It was really not clear where the error was coming from. I guessed that it was coming from \usepackage{microtype}, so I commented it out, but the same error persisted.

I decided to hard refresh the tab and this time I got a different error:

    TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [text input levels=15].

on line 39. Again it was unclear line 39 of which package.

apetresc | 2 hours ago

Anyone know if this includes TikZ?

raybb | 2 hours ago

I love this use of wasm!

I never really got the hang of LaTeX but I've really enjoyed Typst the past few years and even made a few books with it. Have you ever tried that or have thought on it?

init0 | 11 minutes ago

Very similar effort https://latexy.web.app/ :)

gucci-on-fleek | 7 minutes ago

Why you choose to base this off of TeX Live 2020? Is that just when you initially started the project, or are there some incompatibilities with the later versions?

Also, we (the TeX Live team) would be happy to add Wasm as an officially-supported platform, it's just that nobody has volunteered yet [0]. Coincidentally, someone else suggested something similar to us a few months ago [1]. Feel free to reach out if you're interested.

[0]: https://tug.org/texlive/build.html#volunteers

[1]: https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source/issues/87