This program listens on port 9292 for a GET or POST request containing a TeX fragment representing a Tikz picture. It returns a rendering of the picture as an SVG document.
There are two request parameters:
type: [ tikzpicture | tikzcd ]
tex: the body of the picture (i.e., everything after the\begin{tikzpicture}and before the\end{tikzpicture}). If you need some non-default Tikz libraries, you can embed a\usetikzlibrary{...}in your tex.
The type parameter is optional, and defaults to tikzpicture.
The easiest way to deploy this program is using Docker. To create a Docker image,
docker build -t=tex2svg .
Then you can either run the image locally, using
docker run -d -p 9292:9292 tex2svg
or deploy it to a remote server
docker save tex2svg | gzip > tex2svg.tar.gz
scp tex2svg.tar.gz <server-address>:<path-to-tex2svg.tar.gz>
followed by
gunzip -c <path-to-tex2svg.tar.gz> | docker load
docker run -d -p 9292:9292 tex2svg
on the server.
The size of the Docker image is 1.09 GB, which is very modest compared to (just!) a full texlive installation.
Heroku also support Docker deployments,
heroku apps:create [APPNAME]
heroku stack:set container -a [APPNAME]
git push heroku master
Alternatively you can install it manually, as follows.
The program requires a working TeX installation and the pdf2svg commandline application (which, in turn, requires the poppler-glib library).
- Customize the locations of
pdflatexandpdf2svgin theconfig.ymlfile. (Other configuration options include what interfaces the program binds to and what port it listens on.) - Run the command
bundle install --path vendor/bundle
Then you can start the server with
bundle exec rackup
or
bundle exec rackup --daemon
to run it as a daemon.
Only a subset of TeX commands are supported, in addition to the command supported by tikzpicture/tikzcd.
The test suite is still a little sparse. You can run the tests with
bundle exec rake test