In latex, I have to compile once so that it can find out the references it needs, then bibtex so that it extracts the actual references, compile a second time to get the references into the paper and then a third time because a ton of things shift around and now it knows all the figure/page numbers etc.
Over the years many people have hypothesized that once WASM was really mature, it would become practical to fix the issues with web browser layout by sending down custom layout machines to users.
I would find it hilarious if LaTeX turned into a leader in that space. I doubt it could hold on to that. There's a lot of things that something designed from the beginning for web-like uses could probably improve on that would be capable of overcoming LaTeX. But I could see a world where it carves out a niche and holds on to that niche for a long period of time.
I feel like it's fair to say that you have not "fixed the issues with browser layout" if you lose accessibility and input. System fonts I can live without, we can push our own, but those two things are a big deal.
Even input you might be able to hack around but accessibility is a big deal and the "hack" at that point is nearly to both lay it out in the browser and the supposed "fixed" layout system, and while that may work in some sense I again have lots of questions about whether that is really "fixed".
That's part of the reason I'd find it so funny, yes.
The reason why I consider it a possibility is that LaTeX has two things out of the gate: The technical capability, and a small but arguably rabid user base. It's the sort of thing that can take an early lead but is quite unlikely to sustain it.
But you can't deny that LaTeX has had incredible staying power, despite the list of issues that everyone who uses it has with it.
Is this related to web2js[1], which has been around for a while? It compiles the pascal code of TeX to wasm.
It looks like the live demo is no longer up, but it did run latex in the browser and render the dvi output to html. The wasm for TeX is about 495kb / 88kb compressed, but the memory image for LaTeX was a bit larger.
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.21 (SwiftLaTeX PDFTeX 0.3.0) (preloaded format=swiftlatexpdftex)
I can't find the format file `swiftlatexpdftex.fmt'!
Add LuaLaTeX and you're cookin' with gas. For real would be fantastic if we could get more or less the full LaTeX ecosystem readily and rapidly available online and in a huge variety of desktop applications.
I’m really glad the main AI chatbot apps and sites support latex rendering. I tuned my system prompts to get the bots to explain their high level reasoning in equations for me to read if they think it will convey more nuance or dimensionality than casting down to English.
https://www.swiftlatex.com/editor.html for the wysiwyg editor says "We are working hard to fix the editor." It has said this for many years. I think I tried it once when it was live and it was pretty cool. My guess is people observed it could corrupt documents, so it was taken down.
I'm not sure I understand why the second or third compile would work, but not the first.
I would find it hilarious if LaTeX turned into a leader in that space. I doubt it could hold on to that. There's a lot of things that something designed from the beginning for web-like uses could probably improve on that would be capable of overcoming LaTeX. But I could see a world where it carves out a niche and holds on to that niche for a long period of time.
The things you can't do are things like expose an accessibility tree (without a dummy DOM), interact with the system IME, and access system fonts.
Even input you might be able to hack around but accessibility is a big deal and the "hack" at that point is nearly to both lay it out in the browser and the supposed "fixed" layout system, and while that may work in some sense I again have lots of questions about whether that is really "fixed".
FWIW, I actually think it would be much more valuable just to fix the spec and make CSS layout fast-by-default.
Nobody else seemed convinced :(
The reason why I consider it a possibility is that LaTeX has two things out of the gate: The technical capability, and a small but arguably rabid user base. It's the sort of thing that can take an early lead but is quite unlikely to sustain it.
But you can't deny that LaTeX has had incredible staying power, despite the list of issues that everyone who uses it has with it.
It looks like the live demo is no longer up, but it did run latex in the browser and render the dvi output to html. The wasm for TeX is about 495kb / 88kb compressed, but the memory image for LaTeX was a bit larger.
[1]: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.21 (SwiftLaTeX PDFTeX 0.3.0) (preloaded format=swiftlatexpdftex) I can't find the format file `swiftlatexpdftex.fmt'!
Likewise for XeTeX
This is hillarious. Browsers lost the ability to print some 10 years ago. Today, printing a web page is an exercise in masochism.
I am very curious how the output will look like.