Show HN: Latex.to – LaTeX to image converter running in the browser

Show HN: Latex.to – LaTeX to image converter running in the browser(latex.to)

85 points by Wdorf 1 year ago | 38 comments

I've made a website to easily share a LaTeX math formula.

- The image is created in the browser (i.e. the LaTeX is not send to a server for rendering)

- Native share dialog (share via WhatsApp etc.)

- Extra keyboard buttons for symbols like "$" or "\" on mobile

- Share via png or unicode

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fGuTns5Nt9Q

Please let me know any feedback on how to improve the website.

rfdonnelly 1 year ago |

Kroki [1] supports TikZ and by extension: PGF [2] and LaTeX. It supports SVG, PDF, JPEG, and PNG outputs. Rendering is done on the server. URLs can be quite long since the source is embedded in the URL but you can use a URL shortener [3].

[1]: https://kroki.io/ [2]: https://tikz.dev/ [3]: https://tinyurl.com/kroki-svg-example

einpoklum 1 year ago |

> Please let me know any feedback on how to improve the website.

1. You can give credit where it is due - on the website, to katex and the HTML-to-image renderer library/engine. 2. You could offer any of the three possible outputs: Raster image, HTML, MathML - for exporting/sharing/downloading.

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

Thank you for your feedback.

I've just added the links to both projects in the info modal.

I will look into adding HTML and MathML exports in the next version.

mcraiha 1 year ago |

1. Add tooltips to the top icons 2. Support SVG output

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

Thank you, those are both very good suggestions I will look into!

Cieric 1 year ago |

Shorts link didn't work for me, here is the normal player link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGuTns5Nt9Q

I'm not to familiar with LaTeX so I much prefer a WYSIWYG editor. I mainly use things like wolframalpha's editor to really get a good representation of what I need.

I know something like that might be out of scope for something like this, but you could potentially do preprogrammed buttons like having a sqrt button insert "\sqrt{}" to the cursor position.

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

Thank you very much for your feedback, I will look into adding more keyboard buttons like "\sqrt{}"

kreyenborgi 1 year ago |

For the other direction, there is https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html :)

coffeeri 1 year ago | |

Even better is https://simpletex.cn/

Bimos 1 year ago | | |

I'm a native Chinese speaker. I knew Detexify and used it a lot. This is the first time I see this software. I tried with hand written \succeq, and until its anti-crawler mechanism is triggered, it fails to give the answer. You can argue it is a software with a different purpose (e.g. to convert a piece of content rather than a single symbol), but to me it is not "even better" than detexify.

mindv0rtex 1 year ago |

I was recently trying to solve a similar problem but on desktop platforms. I don't want to depend on LaTeX, but I'd like to be able to generate equation images inside a C++ desktop application. I tried to make MathJax run via QuickJS and extract the SVG for rasterization. But I couldn't make MathJax run with QuickJS.

sitkack 1 year ago | |

Have you tried embedding V8 to see how your idea works? Sounds good to me.

mgt19937 1 year ago |

Cool project! I like the idea of easily sharing LaTeX formulas. It's impressive how smooth it works right in the browser.

I've always thought compiling LaTeX in WebAssembly would be a tough nut to crack, so I was curious if that's what you'd done here. Turns out you're using KaTeX.

Have you considered any WebAssembly approaches?

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

Thank you for your positive feedback.

KaTeX does not support all LaTeX features but initializes very quickly.

LaTeX via WebAssembly supports more features but might need longer to initialize.

There's an existing WebAssembly project: https://www.swiftlatex.com

red_trumpet 1 year ago | |

There is TikZJax[1], which apparently compiles TeX to WebAssembly, to run TikZ in the browser.

[1] https://tikzjax.com/

dunham 1 year ago | | |

I played with web2js a couple of years ago. TeX ends up being a 500kb WASM file (88kb gzipped).

The LaTeX format file or the memory image after LaTeX is loaded are a bit bigger though (2.3 MB and 6.3MB gzipped, respectively).

jszymborski 1 year ago | |

Not OP, but do you mind me asking what advantages you hope to achieve by using WebAssembly rather than KaTeX?

trurl42 1 year ago | | |

Well, for one, KaTeX doesn't do "LaTeX" but a limited subset of the TeX equation syntax. As such, it can't handle more complicated macros or typesetting anything apart from equations.

ComputerGuru 1 year ago |

I’d be very interested in the opposite! Lots of scanned or legacy images that would be nice to convert to LaTeX, or to create a robust PDF ingestion pipeline.

Vetch 1 year ago | |

In addition to the already mentioned https://huggingface.co/facebook/nougat-base, I also highly recommend https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/GOT-OCR2_0. It might even be better.

hextex 1 year ago | |

Facebook's Nougat [1] should work with this, but not sure how much preprocessing is needed to yield good results with scanned copies of physical documents. Note that it outputs .mmd files (MultiMarkDown), but the equations and tables should (iirc) output plain LaTeX.

1: https://github.com/facebookresearch/nougat

Wdorf 1 year ago | | |

This looks really interesting! I will definitely have a look.

sorenjan 1 year ago | |

Like Mathpix?

https://mathpix.com/

BeetleB 1 year ago | | |

Mathpix is awesome. So far it has never gotten the output wrong. I even have it integrated into Emacs/org-mode.

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

I could add a GPT based pdf to latex functionality in the future.

programjames 1 year ago |

There's a similar feature on AoPS:

https://aops.com/texer

vzaliva 1 year ago |

Have you considered translating formulae to MathML for rendering?

einpoklum 1 year ago | |

It looks like OP is already doing that. Or rather, OP calls katex (https://katex.org/) to get MathML and HTML; then renders the HTML to a raster image. But he's throwing the MathML away.

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

KaTeX has a build in MathML feature, but I haven't yet looked into it for rendering.

The "Share text" functionality of the website uses KaTeX's MathML feature as an intermediate step.

KeplerBoy 1 year ago |

How does it work? Are you shipping a wasm latex distribution?

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

LaTeX: https://katex.org

Image generation: https://github.com/bubkoo/html-to-image

KeplerBoy 1 year ago | | |

Okay, so it's not LaTeX, just math typesetting that looks like LaTeX and takes LaTeX input.

I'm more interested in solutions that work with the broader LaTeX ecosystem (like SiUnitX or amsmath).

Ennea 1 year ago |

It feels like I am seeing more and more websites lately that have a favicon that is deliberately broken, and I'm not sure why this appears to be a thing that is somehow gaining traction.

Wdorf 1 year ago | |

I will design a proper favicon! I think I implemented the current placeholder according to https://stackoverflow.com/a/13416784

Ennea 1 year ago | | |

The data URI you're using has no MIME type, and even then the data is still an invalid PNG image. Not sure why the Stack Overflow answer is suggesting that.