Show HN: Latex.to – LaTeX to PDF via Full Tex Live in the Browser

latex.to is an Overleaf alternative that now runs a full Tex Live distribution in the browser.

This is done via CheerpX (JIT wasm engine) running a 32bit alpine image with TeX Live.

Things I previously tried: - originally this project started with just KaTeX for LaTeX to image - v86 wasm engine: Too slow (at least 10 times slower than CheerpX) - various TeX Live binaries wasm ports: These usually don't port Biber (because it's a Perl app) or engines like ConTeXt.

What makes this work: - CheerpX only streams (via HTTP range requests) the data it needs. Compiling the base example only downloads 50 MB (the whole image is 5GB). - Cloudflare R2 can only cache files less than 512MB. Hence the 5GB image is split into 1 base image and 19 mount images. - LaTeX needs to bake (index) the fonts before compiling which can take a long time and can OOM CheerpX. Hence all fonts more than 0.7 MB are prebaked into the image file.

The first compile is a bit slower because it needs to download assets like fonts, but everything is cached and the second compile is much faster.

100% free, no login, no compile timeout, documents are compiled in the browser and NOT sent to a remote server.

Please let me know in case something doesn't work / you have any questions or feedback.