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Sorry to tl;dr your code, but how exactly is it based on TeX? Do you actually run Knuth's TeX code to make this work, or did you reimplement it?

Also, kind of irrelevant, do you think we'll ever get something better than (La)TeX syntax? I've been frustrated by obscure error messages from LaTeX in big documents because it's a macro language, so the interpreter doesn't actually see what you're typing. How does KaTeX handle errors?

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We reimplemented the TeX formatting algorithms in JavaScript. Most of them are in https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX/blob/master/src/buildTree.js (there are references to the pages from the TeXbook that the algorithms are on).

Also, we attempt to have relatively good error handling! If you open up the javascript console on the main page and type in a bad expression, you can see what the errors we throw look like. We're not planning on supporting anything other than LaTeX syntax for now though, unfortunately.

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