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Comment by _pmf_ | Hacker News Reader

The first person to port LaTeX to WASM will be hailed as the messiah.

Is it a sign of dumb or a sign of genius not to know what WASM is?

WebAssembly. The spiritual successor to asm.js for representing an easier compile target to browsers from C/C++.

In any case, the sheer size of LaTeX will make such an endeavour probably not very useful (Download 1 GiB to render a document? Probably not.)

> Download 1 GiB to render a document? Probably not.

Any day now we'll be downloading 1 GB in order to read an article, so just give it time …

Almost all the mass in a TeX installation is in the fonts and documentation. If you just need a TeX engine (lualatex) and use system fonts, it's just a MB or two.

In asm.js (excluding fonts and documentation) it's about 3 MB https://github.com/manuels/texlive.js/blob/master/pdftex-wor...

Oh yeah, I've heard of Web assembly, just not the acronym.

It took me a minute, but probably Webassembly

they you can create a WASMey

It wouldn't take much to bring this to WASM:

http://manuels.github.io/texlive.js/

See previous story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5083361

Remember this only generates the LaTeX source. Overleaf does the heavy lifting for rendering.

What could you mean by that? texlive compiles.

The original project only generates LaTeX, it doesn't compile or output.

How does Overleaf compare to Sharelatex?

From what I've seen Sharelatex limits collaborators where as Overleaf limits the file size.

Isn't there a WASM backend to LLVM already?

But, do you want to render a resulting .pdf? If it's going into a canvas, I can see it taking some serious work.

(I think I did never write something as hard to parse for lay-people for explaining so simple an idea. There's something very wrong with the above comment.)

Javascript-based PDF renderers exist already - Firefox uses one by default.

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/

Including the complete set of packages provided by texlive-full of course. :)

"A Script on this page is causing it to run slow".

Check network inspector tab texlive-full.js - 2.4Gb.

Still less than some SPA.

The actually TeX binary is actually quite small - it is little more than a macro processor. The other packages could actually be loaded on demand and kept in a local cache.

Beyond a basic set of packages, this is what MikTex does, and why I prefer it to TexLive on Windows.

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