Latex.to
LaTeX to PDF via Full Tex Live in the Browser
Details
- External ID
- 49158317
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Latex.to
- Website domain
- latex.to
- Launched
- Aug. 3, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.3125
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
Hi HN, I implemented your feedback: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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- document and PDF utility tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- latex to pdf converter in browser
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the web editor UI and template library are straightforward to build, running a complete 5.6 GB TeX Live distribution client-side via CheerpX x86 virtualization and virtual filesystem emulation requires complex systems engineering.
What it would actually take: The architecture uses CheerpX (a WebAssembly-based x86 JIT virtual machine) running a 32-bit Alpine Linux environment that executes native TeX engines (pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX). The primary difficulty is orchestrating the virtual block device, IndexedDB caching for gigabytes of package binaries, and mapping I/O between the browser DOM and the emulated Linux environment without latency bottlenecks. Building this requires deep knowledge of WebAssembly system interfaces, OS virtualization, and TeX package management.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 250 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #97 of 251 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 275 days after the earliest competitor.
- TeXbrain, a LaTeX editor that runs pdfTeX in the browser via WASM · hn · 2026-08-25 · 118 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- How far can you push file conversion into the browser? · hn · 2026-02-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- LaTeX To Image · ph · 2026-09-19 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Docx to PDF in the Browser Using Pandoc and Typst (WASM) · hn · 2026-02-09 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- <15MB Local-first Interactive LaTeX Scratchpad in the Browser · hn · 2026-09-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Doc-Translator.org · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- MDXport · hn · 2025-12-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- ipynb to PDF · ph · 2026-09-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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