3 ms·

Dumb question but what stops browsers from rendering TeX directly (aside from the work to implement it)? I assume it's more than just the rendering

pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago
For starters, TeX is Turing-complete, and the tokenizer is arbitrarily reprogrammable at runtime.
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  Okay then, what would stop you rendering TeX to SVG and embedding that? Edit: Genuine question, not rhetorical - I don't know how well it would work but it sounds like it should.
  - fooofw 10mo ago
    That would (mostly if not always) work in the sense of reproducing the layout of the pages, but would defeat the purpose of preserving the semantic information present in the TeX file (what is a heading, a reference and to what, a specific math environment, etc.) which is AFAIK already mostly dropped on conversion to PDF by the latex compiler.
    - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
      Couldn't you write a TeX renderer that emitted HTML (or RST, or Markdown, or whatever) with SVG for the equations?
      - fooofw 10mo ago
        I think this project is based on LaTeXML (https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/ https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/) which is exactly that (except for the SVG part)
- gbear605 10mo ago
  Browsers already support JavaScript anyway, so why not add another Turing-complete language into the mix? (Not even accounting for CSS technically being Turing-complete, or WASM, or …)
- fph 10mo ago
  As far as I know the Tex team has been working hard lately on supporting accessible "tagged pdfs". Hopefully one day Tex/Latex output will be accessible by default and conversion to HTML will not be needed.
bo1024 10mo ago
You mean a display engine that works like an HTML renderer, except starting from TeX source instead of HTML source? I think you could get something that mostly works, but it would be a pain and at the end you wouldn't have CSS or javascript, so I don't think browser makers are interested.

pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago

For starters, TeX is Turing-complete, and the tokenizer is arbitrarily reprogrammable at runtime.

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
Okay then, what would stop you rendering TeX to SVG and embedding that? Edit: Genuine question, not rhetorical - I don't know how well it would work but it sounds like it should.
- fooofw 10mo ago
  That would (mostly if not always) work in the sense of reproducing the layout of the pages, but would defeat the purpose of preserving the semantic information present in the TeX file (what is a heading, a reference and to what, a specific math environment, etc.) which is AFAIK already mostly dropped on conversion to PDF by the latex compiler.
  - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    Couldn't you write a TeX renderer that emitted HTML (or RST, or Markdown, or whatever) with SVG for the equations?
    - fooofw 10mo ago
      I think this project is based on LaTeXML (https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/ https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/) which is exactly that (except for the SVG part)
gbear605 10mo ago
Browsers already support JavaScript anyway, so why not add another Turing-complete language into the mix? (Not even accounting for CSS technically being Turing-complete, or WASM, or …)
fph 10mo ago
As far as I know the Tex team has been working hard lately on supporting accessible "tagged pdfs". Hopefully one day Tex/Latex output will be accessible by default and conversion to HTML will not be needed.

bo1024 10mo ago

You mean a display engine that works like an HTML renderer, except starting from TeX source instead of HTML source? I think you could get something that mostly works, but it would be a pain and at the end you wouldn't have CSS or javascript, so I don't think browser makers are interested.