[Haskell-cafe] ANN: latex-svg

[Oleg Grenrus]

I occasionally write blog posts with some math. So far I have been using
latex-formulae family of packages. This week Andres Löh asked whether
LaTeX can be rendered as SVGs.

The answer turns out to be yes, it wasn't few years ago.

The preview CTAN package, and the dvisvgm tool make it very easy. I
forked latex-formulae into latex-svg to use above mentioned tools. There
are three packages on Hackage now:

- latex-svg-image: render LaTeX formulae to SVG images
- latex-svg-pandoc: render LaTeX formulae in pandoc documents
- latex-svg-hakyll: render LaTeX formulae in hakyll pages

To mention some differences between latex-formulae and latex-svg:

- latex-svg-image uses only latex and dvisvgm, ImageMagick is not
required. You don't need to tweak policy.xml to allow rasterization of
PostScript. (See this StackOverflow question).

- latex-svg-image supports global cache (off by default), which speedups
hakyll site builds. My blog builds in 20 seconds instead of three
minutes with empty cache. I wouldn't worry about space usage too much,
the cache contents take 15M after building my blog. which is way less
than the size of site executable.

- latex-svg-hakyll has initFormulaCompilerSVGPure variant, which doesn't
need IO to be created. You don't need to thread renderFormulae function
through. Together with global cache, the perfomance penalty is small.

- One drawback is that result pages become bigger (and slower). For
example a formula-heavy
https://oleg.fi/gists/posts/2018-12-12-find-correct-laws.html is

    - 576k in size with latex-formulae
    - 2819k in size with latex-svg (almost 5 times larger).

  Rendering SVG images is also more CPU expensive.

Otherwise the API and module names are the same. If you are already a
user of latex-formulae you can easily migrate to latex-svg.

See the announcement blog post how some examples look like:
https://oleg.fi/gists/posts/2020-03-06-latex-svg.html
<http://oleg.fi/gists/posts/2020-03-06-latex-svg.html>
<http://oleg.fi/gists/posts/2020-03-06-latex-svg.html>

Crisp math-blogging to everyone

- Oleg Grenrus


<http://oleg.fi/gists/posts/2020-03-06-latex-svg.html>