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.
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?
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?
I tried uploading a .tex file created earlier this year and was able to see a PDF preview without any additional configuration.
As someone who has a local TeX setup, I'm a fan of your approach to loading dependencies on demand with a service worker. The installation process on my computer took a while because it was downloading a bunch of dependencies I didn't need.
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:
Cool! But it appears to always use LuaTeX as the engine, so only the older MkIV format is supported, and not the current LMTX format. The caching also doesn't seem to work quite right, since it appears to regenerate the font caches every time that you run it, which makes recompiles quite slow.
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
Very similar effort https://latexy.web.app/ :)
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?
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.
Ooh. That worked. Thanks.
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?
Cool, this project looks very interesting!
I tried uploading a .tex file created earlier this year and was able to see a PDF preview without any additional configuration.
As someone who has a local TeX setup, I'm a fan of your approach to loading dependencies on demand with a service worker. The installation process on my computer took a while because it was downloading a bunch of dependencies I didn't need.
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
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:
on line 39. Again it was unclear line 39 of which package.This is super cool. I wish there was something like this for ConTeXt too.
I wrote a Markdown -> ConTeXt -> PDF editor that may interest you.
* https://keenwrite.com/
* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
Interesting. I usually use pandoc for converting my Markdown, which goes via LaTeX. Is there a specific reason you picked ConTeXt?
> I usually use pandoc for converting my Markdown
See my Typesetting Markdown series:
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...
> Is there a specific reason you picked ConTeXt?
LaTeX:
* doesn't (easily, or practically) separate content from presentation;
* has arcane, antiquated syntax;
* packages can have namespace conflicts (rare, but happens);
* requires package installation for additional features.
ConTeXt, being monolithic and newer, avoids all those issues. The feature matrix lists a number of samples typeset with ConTeXt:
https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
FWIW, pandoc has the ability to generate ConTeXt code.
My project https://latex.to supports ConTeXt (plus all other TeX Live engines). Click + then New from showcase then ConTeXt to try it.
Cool! But it appears to always use LuaTeX as the engine, so only the older MkIV format is supported, and not the current LMTX format. The caching also doesn't seem to work quite right, since it appears to regenerate the font caches every time that you run it, which makes recompiles quite slow.
Anyone know if this includes TikZ?
Well done!