A javascript library for rendering javascript on the web, using DOM and HTML5.
TeX and HTML are both very useful and elegant ways of typesetting text, although designed for completely different purposes. HTML is today used for displaying (often dynamically generated) content on the web on a variety of different devices with different screen resolutions and sizes. With the advent of HTML5, the possibility of the user to interact with the webpage he or she is visiting has grown tremendously. TeX, on the other hand, has always been designed and used for typesetting text in a very well-defined environment, where the page proportions and maybe even the print resolution are known exactly by the person designing the document.
Any approach that attempts to build a bridge between those two worlds of typesetting needs to take into account these different design goals. Some features of TeX do not make much sense on the web today, and some things can be achieved much more easily and efficiently.
The web provides a wide variety of "converters" that are capable of translating TeX to HTML. However, none of these are capable of translating typical documents without the need of user adjustments. A list of available converters including their features and shortcomings can be found here: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=LaTeX2HTML
However, this project follows a completely differnt approach. The feature that people typically have in mind when thinking about converting a TeX document to HTML is to be able to view their LaTeX document in a browser. But browsers can do way more than HTML rendering - they know javascript. A javascript library could be designed to render TeX documents inside the browser, making use of existing libraries to achieve the most complicated features, and dynamically generate the website for the user. This could be employed in a wide variety of use cases, starting from a simple interface of viewing documents up to a fully featured WYSIWYG LaTeX inside the browser.
The code that directly belongs to this project is published under the FreeBSD license. However, this project refers to and uses external libraries with different licensing, that is:
- mathematical formulae are rendered with MathJax (http://www.mathjax.org/), which is distributed under the Apache License 2.0
- it is currently planned (but not yet implemented) to employ texlive.js (https://github.com/manuels/texlive.js) to use advanced features (like the "picture" environment or the "tikz" and "pgfplots" packages) of LaTeX, so that the implementation of domtex.js can be kept simple and compact
The project is currently in alpha stage, only capable of rendering relatively simple documents that employ a special, well-selected set of features. It is currently unclear when this project will leave alpha stage.
The domtex.js library currently makes heavy use of HTML5 and other brand new features. It is thus very likely that it will perform differntly (or not at all) in some browsers. Developement and bugfixes are currently only done for Google Chrome.