TeXbrain, a LaTeX editor that runs pdfTeX in the browser via WASM
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I'm a master's engineering student and a big fan of LaTeX, which I used for my thesis and research articles. I have used Overleaf and that was fine until I wanted to git sync, which unfortunately sits behind a paywall. Since I didn't want to pay subscriptions for things that should simply just work, I built the editor I wanted in my free time, where you open a tab, write LaTeX, get your PDF and the files stay all in one folder on my disk.TeXbrain is a static site with no backend. pdfTeX is compiled to WebAssembly (SwiftLaTeX) and runs in your browser. The editor can read and write your project folder through the File System Access API, so you can use git, any local TeX install, local AI Agents, or any other editor on the same files. Git is built in through isomorphic-git for anyone who would rather not touch a terminal and clone, branch, commit, push or pull via commands. No account is needed, no analytics, and everything works offline after the first load.Try it out: https://tex.swimmingbrain.dev/ (Chromium browsers get direct folder access, while Firefox or Safari fall back to a virtual filesystem)Or for self-hosting/contributing: https://github.com/swimmingbrain/texbrain (MIT, the pdfTeX engine is EPL 2.0 / GPL 2.0 and is listed in the THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES file).The part I'm most proud of getting to work is the package loading. The engine itself is only 1.8 MB. When it asks for a file it doesn't have, then a service worker intercepts the request and resolves it through Cache Storage first, then a small bundled subset, then a TeX Live tree mirrored on jsDelivr, then a SwiftLaTeX style server as a last resort. Every file is fetched once at most and after the first successful compilation, the core subset is prefetched in the background so that the offline story actually holds. Only file names go over the network, never any document content.So far, it only supports pdfTeX (no XeTeX or LuaTeX), so fontspec or polyglossia won't work, packages are pinned to the TeX Live 2020 era to stay coherent with the engine's format file and there is no bibtex or biber in the engine yet, which is maybe the roughest edge.This is should be a good solution for people on a work laptop, a Chromebook, or a university lab PC where installing TeX Live isn't always an option, and people who don't want to maintain a TeX install at all. If you already have a local setup you like, keep it. This isn't necessarily thought as a replacement for that.Some people have already used it for their thesis in the past months and their bug reports (which I would never have hit on my own) were then most of the summer's work. The first outside PR also landed recently, so if something doesn't compile for you, an issue with the package name or the bug itself is the most useful thing you can send me!
HN · launched Aug 25, 2026 · 118 upvotes (top 6%) · 0 views
Niche: text and document editors · 95 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▼ -46% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 95 launches in text and document editors →
Could you build this?
Partial The web editor and UI are simple, but compiling and configuring the pdfTeX C/C++ codebase with TeX packages into a performant WebAssembly binary is technically challenging.
What it would actually take: The frontend is a standard Monaco or CodeMirror editor with PDF.js viewer. The hard part is cross-compiling the legacy Web2C/pdfTeX C codebase to WebAssembly using Emscripten, emulating a virtual POSIX filesystem with MEMFS/OPFS, and bundling/optimizing TeX font and package tarballs for fast browser-side execution.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Overleaf, Crixet (OpenAI Prism), Latexy, Typst, pandoc
Concerns raised: Abbreviated compile log, not full, LaTeX preview not visible on mobile, Font cache regenerates on every recompile, making it slow, Only supports older MkIV format, not current LMTX format, Caching doesn't work correctly
Feature requests: Full/detailed compile log display, Hello-world example template on landing, Support for graph drawing sublibrary (requires LuaTeX), Mobile responsive preview, New Project button with filesystem fallback for all browsers
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 498 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #15 of 499 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 294 days after the earliest competitor.
- OpenTex · ph · 2026-11-02 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- Latex.to · hn · 2026-08-03 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- <15MB Local-first Interactive LaTeX Scratchpad in the Browser · hn · 2026-09-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- TeX Side Preview in VSCode · ph · 2026-10-12 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- ModernTex · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Unleaf · ph · 2026-09-29 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- PDF Studio · ph · 2026-11-07 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Docx to PDF in the Browser Using Pandoc and Typst (WASM) · hn · 2026-02-09 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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