ANN: latex-svg packages

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 can be rendered as SVGs.

The answer is yes.

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.

At the end few examples. We can type set quadratic formula

or an exponent tower like

or a charterization of equality of real numbers using "downsets"

from a recent post by Brent Yorgey.

The difference is clearly visible on high-DPI displays, for example mobile devices.

#Update 0.2: Font size and raw tex blocks

As the font-size can be configured, the inline math like looks nicer. Also note that the baseline is taken into account.

For example you can draw tikz-cd diagrams:

For this to work the Ext_raw_tex pandoc extension should be enabled.

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