I Built "The Monospace Web" | Hacker News Reader

I Built "The Monospace Web"

wickstrom.tech

13 pointstodsacerdoti11 comments

Author here. It's title is "How [...]", which sounds a little less weird. :)

You can edit the title after the 'auto-correcter' kicked in.

Right, but I didn't submit it.

I was jarred by the unexpected choice of font on this page that it was too distracting to try to read and stopped.

I'm a backend engineer and find the frontend tedious. I'd like to find something like latex, but that is also can scale nicely between PC and mobile screens. Is this it? Anyone knows of a frontend solution that could support this use-case?

You're describing HTML.

html is nothing like latex, quite the opposite. Latex does all the formatting for you and produces a perfect document, html is just a markup language.

HTML is made to be flexible by using CSS, LaTeX is a typesetting program. It sets the whole document to look nice in one specific view, which is the final PDF. Or mre precisely, LaTeX works best for printed media

There are efforts for web maths, which would close the gap considerably for rendering science articles.

Most of the other LaTeX features can be achieved with HTML, CSS and maybe JS. Or even Markdown + preprocessor.

it can be achieved, but at what cost? you need to waste time with css and js to get something latex gets you out of the box. The question was is there something like latex for frontend, and is the "monospace web" it? "html does the thing" can technically be a true answer, if you completely ignore any contextual understanding. I'm looking for a simpler solution, not one that would waste more time.

This is a bit like insisting on using latex without ever touching packages, and then asking for the functionality of packages anyway. At least for the CSS part.

The cost is not that high. There are plenty static site generators or things like pandoc. For example: https://pianomanfrazier.com/post/write-a-book-with-markdown/

You are asking for a responsive weblayout, which excludes any format that LaTeX outputs. Latex is a typesetting engine that does the job before presenting anything and not while presenting it. Its layouts are not responsive by design.

So your question if there is something like LaTeX for frontend is just misplaced, because the working method of LaTex does not fit into a responsive weblayout frontend. What LaTeX features do you want in a frontend? How do you want to write code and how do you want the layout to happen?

What you describe sounds more like static site generation with math handling and perhaps references. There are markdown extensions that can handle such things. For rendering there is e.g. https://www.mathjax.org/

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