| (I'm a co-founder at Overleaf.com, which does collaborative 'LaTeX in the browser' in a different sense.) I like the idea of a 'sane' subset of LaTeX that is easy to publish to the web. There are tools like LaTeXML and TeX4ht that try to convert general LaTeX documents to (X)HTML, but it's a very hard problem. Some difficulties arise from the fact that TeX is just very hard to parse in general. Even the first stage of parsing TeX is Turing complete [1]. This makes it hard to write tooling e.g. for linting (though tools exist, e.g. chktex) or creating a WYSIWYG editor backed by LaTeX [2]. (edit: or creating a good LaTeX auto-complete [4]) Others arise from TeX's extensibility --- there are many thousands of packages that define their own commands and environments for different types of documents and different disciplines. This extensibility is on the one hand one of the main reasons that TeX and LaTeX are still actively used some 40 years after TeX's initial release, but on the other hand a major challenge for conversion to HTML. The LaTeXML project has many custom bindings [3] for these packages, but it's far from complete. I guess the main question is whether we can find the right subset, and this project looks like a great start. [1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4201/is-there-a-bnf-... [2] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81 --- my first attempt at rich text on Overleaf, many years ago [3] http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/manual/customization/customizat... [4] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/523-a-data-driven-approach-to-... |
