web2js VS KaTeX

When I last looked, it seemed like WASM blobs just take arrays of numbers and return arrays of numbers. No objects, strings, or DOM elements, so I think it'd be tough to do web dev in wasm as it stands. And you need javascript glue if you want anything in the way of side effects.

There is, however, quite a bit you can do in it. TeX has been compiled to wasm[1], it's about 600kb uncompressed 90k compressed (the memory image with latex loaded is about 6MB compressed though - latex is a beast). I think anything computationally intensive would be a good candidate for wasm (it has int64).

1: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

I implemented a TeX engine in WebAssembly so you really can run TeX in the browser. You can see a demo of this at https://tex.rossprogram.org/ and at https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js you can find a Pascal compiler that targets WebAssembly which can compile Knuth's TeX. Interesting primitives like \directjs are also implemented, so you can execute javascript from inside TeX. The rendering is handled with https://github.com/kisonecat/dvi2html for which I finally fixed some font problems.

To make it relatively fast, the TeX engine gets snapshotted and shipped to the browser with much of TeXlive already loaded. So even things like TikZ work reasonably well. There is of course a lot more to do! The plan is to convert ximera.osu.edu to this new backend by the fall.

I want to resolve this KaTeX issue, so in order to test my ideas, is there some LaTeX test file with just a lot of equations, preferably inline (since this issue is related to inline math) but without fancy libraries or stuff not included in KaTeX?

> Could you elaborate on why you switched away from it?

I started using KaTeX sometime after 2015 because it promised to be fast (the fastest! [1]). I had to change the representation of a bunch of expressions because KaTeX didn't support some environments, whilst MathJax did. It was a trade-off I was willing to accept at the time.

Many years later, I started writing a personal static-site generator. I wanted comparatively lightweight pages, so rendering server-side was an option. I re-evaluated MathJax vs KaTeX again and this time I leaned towards MathJax, as speed was no longer an issue for me. It looks like KaTeX has broader support now [2].

[1] https://katex.org

[2] https://katex.org/docs/support_table.html

Another alternative: Create a WebView by using UIViewRepresentable and Webkit together with MathJax or Katex where Katex is the better option. Here is a link to katex: https://katex.org/

This isn't a LaTeX question. It's a web dev question. Probably best directed at folks who make (or use) KaTeX.

KaTeX

(1) [https://katex.org/

If you want to make it from scratch, go with https://www.slatejs.org/examples/richtext, then use something like https://katex.org/ for rendering the LaTeX, and maybe Mathjs.org for plotting.

The speed of KaTeX is great, but the lack of support for diagrams (a la tikz-cd) is what makes KaTeX unsuitable for general adoption by mathematicians (e.g., mathoverflow.net and all online mathematical wiki I know use MathJax). KaTeX has some rudimentary support for diagrams though the {CD} environment, but something more fully fledged akin to tizk-cd or xymatrix is needed. There's been some discussion on their github (https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX/issues/219), but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Haven't personally used it, but have heard of KaTeX