Jim Fowler seemed like Calculus' biggest hype man when the MOOC ball was just starting to roll. If you're looking to brush up and like the more energetic/engaging style I'd recommend checking out his videos on YouTube or elsewhere.
> Using web2js, the Pascal source of tex is compiled to WebAssembly; the latex format is loaded (without all the hyphenation data), and [...] is executed. Then core is dumped; the resulting core is compressed, and by reloading the dumped core in the browser, it is possible to very quickly get to a point where TikZ can be executed. By using an SVG driver for PGF along with dvi2html, the DVI output is converted to an SVG.
This is the kind of hack I'm here for.
Funny seeing this on the front page – I'm coding a project as I'm browsing this that makes heavy use of TikZJax.
Overall, I'm impressed by how seamlessly it works when it does work. But it's not perfect:
- Some core library functions (for example, most types of fill patterns) simply don't work or aren't implemented for some reason.
- There are a few long-standing bugs. For instance, if using the intersections library to compute the intersection of a line and a circle, it straight-up crashes the entire TikZJax process. Intersections of two lines or two circles are fine, but circle+line fails. My attempts at diagnosing this seem to indicate that it's running out of stack space, so maybe the original TikZ code uses some inefficient recursive algorithm to compute this intersection, and this exceeds some stack size limit that the WebAssembly version introduces. I'm not sure and I haven't been able to get much traction.
- The project doesn't seem to get any love from the original developers anymore. I've filed multiple bugs for months now that never get any form of acknowledgement.
- The build process is pretty convoluted and difficult to reproduce (to try to fix those aforementioned bugs myself), which I guess is what you'd expect from a project that attempts to cross-compile a 20-year-old macro package for a 50-year-old Pascal codebase for rendering in the browser.
Overall I'm very glad TikZJax exists and there's still no better-looking and convenient-to-author diagramming language than TikZ itself. But there's definitely rough edges.
Using a “core dump” (dumping the webassembly heap) is an interesting optimization approach with historical precedent both in TeX itself and projects like Emacs (dump/unexec) — https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Bu...
It’s also notoriously fragile and non-portable on native targets; I’m curious how one implements it under webassembly, and how it compares.
Being able to start a process, have it run for a bit to, say, read in initialization data, populating dynamic data structures along the way, and then interrupt the process and save the whole state as a new executable, was a feature built into DEC’s Tops10 and Tops20 operating systems / standard runtimes, along with related custom systems like Waits, under which TeX was developed. It took just two lines of code for TeX to implement its side of this feature on those first platforms.
It came as a bit of a shock at the time that all the Unix-y systems had no such native concept, and that fragile, non-portable user-space schemes were required to mimic this functionality.
Hm. Either that page or the tech itself is not great on mobile.
Takes a second or so to load on mine (iOS Safari). But then it shows correctly, even if the second diagram is a bit small (it fits in a quarter of the 1in circle).
It crashes (“a problem repeatedly occurred”) a few seconds after loading everything on my device (also iOS Safari).
I love tikz, but lightweight it is not; it’s not a huge surprise it takes a few seconds to render.
No idea what’s causing the crash, though.
Well iOS Safari is in general buggy and tends to display the "a problem repeatedly occurred" message on many other slightly heavy web pages. This web page shouldn't be blamed for causing Safari to crash.
Nobody is assigning blame, we don’t know the root cause.
I could just as easily say that Safari shouldn’t be blamed for a buggy website, but I’d be overreaching just as much as you just did.
By definition buggy websites that crash the browser are bugs in the browser.
It may have security implications, or it may not. It might just be an innocent case of someone using assertions instead of proper error reporting. Nevertheless it's a bug in the browser.
Safari will terminate a page for using excess resources with the same message.
So? Still Safari's problem for not displaying a proper error message.
The author does not have an iphone to test.