Real-Time LuaTeX: Recompiling Large Documents in 1ms [pdf](www.tug.org)
51 pointsby amichail9 hours ago7 comments
  • froh8 hours ago
    the purpose (from the paper):

    > texlode, the browser-based book editor built on this architecture, is scheduled for public release in October 2026. It provides collaborative editing via conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), manu- script import from Word, proceedings management, cover design tools, and print-ready PDF output iden- tical to standard LuaLATEX. The accompanying con- ference talk demonstrates the editor in action. For details: texlode.com.

    and also:

    > (section) 6 Comparison to Typst

  • VorpalWay8 hours ago
    > Benchmarks show that per-paragraph recompilation achieves O(1) latency, constant regardless of document size, whereas Typst’s [3] incremental compilation scales linearly (O(n)).

    > The tradeoff is temporary inconsistency: pages the user is not viewing may lag until a background compile converges, [...]

    There doesn't seem to be any reason functionality like this couldn't also be added to Typst though. In general the authors of this paper seem dismissive of typst, but Typst also fixes so many other things about LaTeX, like the awful syntax. Not sure why they act like that.

    • aragilar11 minutes ago
      The answer is fairly obvious, Typst (like ConTeXt) is not LaTeX. Typst is a perfectly fine solution if you're giving the typeset output (i.e. a PDF) to someone, it not a solution if you need to give the document source to someone (if the person expects LaTeX, or .doc(x), or some other format). Many of the issues people raise with LaTeX are due to needing to pass on the document source to someone (otherwise you could use whatever packages or engines you wanted), but that is fundamental to interoperability and why LaTeX (and Markdown) stick around.
    • nicce8 hours ago
      > Not sure why they act like that.

      They seem to launch paid competitor.

  • FullGarden_S3 hours ago
    This is great but I feel like the potential is underused.

    I know its a lot of work but I think we all could desperately use an interactive LaTeX notebook instead of limiting it to only the PDF backend and this work helps a lot with achieving that endeavour. Though it'll be limited to LuaTeX, it'll still be quite something.

    • pjmlp2 hours ago
      Back in the 90's, one of my professors had such software on Solaris.

      The experience was just like using Word, but with LaTeX.

      Unfortunately not the kind of stuff the vi and emacs folks care about.

      Although LyX comes close.

  • xvilka2 hours ago
    Looks like layout/format of this PDF is heavily broken - line overflows and out of the context/layout line at the end...
  • mkl7 hours ago
    No mention of TikZ. Realtime TikZ would be really useful to me. I will wait and see what their https://texlode.com service is like for that.
  • zhxiaoliang5 hours ago
    Typst taking 300ms to do 300 pages cannot be seen as 4FPS - you don't treat the sum of 300 pages as single frame, LOL. And laying out a single paragraph is not 1ms for a whole document either. The paper is otherwise pretty good, but these rhetorics are probably not necessary, IMO.
    • pama4 hours ago
      It is no rhetoric. It is the time spent when working interactively on a thesis project with one software vs the other.
  • mproud5 hours ago
    Personally, I am enjoying using Typst.
    • astrobiased5 hours ago
      Same, so much in fact that I have used it for my website now and it works beautifully for graphics and formulas.