r/LaTeX

I was reflecting on some of the recent posts to this subreddit -- the rise of vibe-coded overleaf clones, the crisis of faith post, questions that periodically come up about when and why latex is slow -- and was inspired to share a hobby project I've been working on for a while.

The tl;dr is that I've been working on a new TeX engine, built around the twin ideas of (a) trying to preserve the amazing legacy of TeX (i.e., the engine must be "TeX" in Knuth's sense of passing the trip test) and (b) thinking seriously about the demands of modern document authoring. I think LuaTeX is amazing (I use it every day!), and I simultaneously believe it is worth questioning the boundary between what lives in the macro layer versus what is handled by the engine itself.

To explore this, I've been developing a C++23 version of TeX82 that maintains strict TeX compatibility, while also natively using modern fonts, generating accessible pdfs, outputting directly to html, and doing at least some parts of document compilation in parallel. This engine is not quite ready for release -- out of respect for the existing ecosystem and Knuth's legacy of stability, I want to avoid rushing something out that causes fragmentation -- but I thought it might be a good time to start this kind of conversation.

I'd be interested to hear everyone's thoughts in the comments. I put together a short technical demo showing the parallel compilation and HTML output in action (link).

I've been building a faster way to type math: a tolerant shorthand that resolves into LaTeX as you go. To stress-test it, I turned it into a game. An equation appears, you race to reproduce it.

https://i.redd.it/pat2cmc4h0bh1.gif

What you see me typing is the shorthand, not raw LaTeX. It commits to LaTeX under the hood, so the output is the real thing and the input takes fewer keystrokes.

My own times: integrals land around 6-7 seconds, limits a bit more once the \to, the bounds and a \frac stack up (7-8s). That's about handwriting speed, except the output compiles.

Here's where I need you. If you're fluent in raw LaTeX, how long does an integral or a limit take you from memory? That's the comparison I can't run myself, and it's the one that tells me whether this shorthand is worth anything.

It comes from MathCursor (a VS Code plugin); the game runs in the browser, so you can try it without installing anything: https://game.mathcursor.com

Yes, this overlaps with snippet setups (UltiSnips and friends). The difference I'm chasing is tolerance and disambiguation instead of fixed expansions, so fast, slightly-off typing still resolves to the structure I meant. Curious whether that's worthwhile, or whether good snippets already cover it. Roast welcome.

Hello, some background info first (tl;dr below this paragraph): I am a Physics student (small chance I may choose to switch to purely math, I at least want to minor in math if possible) just finishing up my first year of college. I am starting Calc 4 over the summer (It's a quarterly school, so I think the more accurate thing to say would be multivariable calculus...? For clarification: last quarter's calc course began with sequences and series and wrapped up with calculus on vector-valued functions. The first lecture of this quarter introduced functions of several variables and partial derivatives.) I have am yet to take a linear algebra or differential equations course (although we brushed on these in Calc 2 with some basics- slope fields, Euler's method, easy separable equations). I will be taking both of those next year starting in Fall. I also have not actually had a physics course in college yet, as I will be taking the ones which require calculus prereqs. I will also be starting those in the Fall.

tl;dr: I am just starting multivariable calculus, and have not (yet) learned any linear algebra.

I want to start reading published mathematics papers, but I don't even know where to start to find papers to read. I am totally open to learning new things/fields/subjects. However, I need to at least find a jumping off point that I will actually be able to understand, and sources that are free (I have access to my college's online library, though, so I may be able to read things which typically aren't free if I can access them through that). Can anyone offer recommendations/guidance for me to find what I am looking for? If more info would help, I have two main motivators - see below.

1. I think math is cool, and I like learning about it lol.

2. I have written up almost all of my projects for calculus using LaTeX. I began by going into my first document completely blind, and have learned as I went along. I have learned a lot and I am fairly comfortable with it by now, but I would like to learn how to present ideas, structure/format/edit my documents, and overall just hone my skills to write the way a real mathematician would write a paper. I want a better understanding from the little things (like when to/when not to number equations, typical conventions for page numbering/title pages/section and subsection numbering conventions, etc.) to the bigger things (like overall structure of my writing/prose, when should I be adding more detailed explanation/when is it acceptable or preferable to omit detailed explanation, etc.), and I think the best way to get a feel for these things will be by actually reading papers that hold up to the standard for publication. I know that publication standard writing is not actually necessary for these projects (I'm pretty sure I'm the only student who has even typed them up at all), but this is a personal goal of mine.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

The benchmark posted recently got me thinking. Although kids these days don’t know how good they have it (LaTeX runs used to take minutes, not seconds), modern typesetting engines like Typst are faster due to (presumably) shedding a lot of historical baggage.

If we assume no change to the actually page layout algorithms in LaTeX (there are good reasons they will always require multiple passes), what are the main areas for potential improvement in the future?

* the monolithic texmf structure? File lookup is cached so shouldn’t be *too* slow, but I remember in the past when installing minimal TeX Live installations they seemed to be snappier. Do we need to cull unneeded files from texmf?

* many file I/O operations? I remember compilation speeds improving significantly when we switched to SSDs everywhere. Should third party packages try harder to use docstrip to bundle their code into single files only? Should there be a dynamic caching step so if the preamble doesn’t change it can be loaded from a precompiled dump? Images can be slow to load, are there steps in this process that could be multithreaded? (I.e., LaTeX only needs to know the size, it’s only the PDF embedding that requires the full content.)

* the TeX machinery itself? Switching from TeX code entirely isn’t feasible in the short term but is there something the engine can do to make the macro expansion language more efficient? A better hashmap? Some kind of JIT system that attempts to “compile” TeX code before executing it?

Hi guys,

I'm currently trying to upload a revised paper to CAIE. There's two options: revised manuscript (unmarked, editable source) and revised manuscript (marked up).

And no matter what I do, the .Tex for the unmarked won't compile, while the marked one compiles no problem.

Is this a journal error? Or an understanding error on my part? The only difference between the .Tex files is the markup in-text.

I write papers in LaTeX and dread making the conceptual figures — architectures, pipelines, system diagrams. Hand-writing TikZ is slow; AI generated diagrams are hard to edit and had to get vector quality.

OpenTikZ is the "Flaticon for academic TikZ" — conceptual/overview figures (system block diagrams, neural-network architectures, pipelines, flowcharts) for your papers. Four ways to use it:

• Use icons — grab a single icon, no AI needed: copy its .tex (or download SVG/PNG) and \input it.
• Edit a template — tell the agent the change; it edits the template and verifies it compiles.
• PNG → TikZ — hand the agent a figure image; get editable TikZ back.
• Describe → TikZ — describe a figure in words; the agent drafts it from the library.

Content is CC0 (use it in any paper, no attribution); tooling is MIT.

Gallery: https://opentikz.org

Source: https://github.com/opentikz/opentikz

It's early (30+ figures so far), so I'd really value feedback～

I love Context. Here’s why.

I used LaTeX for a long time. I’ve come to appreciate it and tried to master it.

But when I discovered Context a few years ago, I was blown away by how simple and flexible it is, how detailed it is, and (at least in my opinion) how much better it is than LaTeX.

I highly recommend checking it out and giving it a try. There are so many reasons to prefer it—if only because:
- it takes just two lines to harness the full power of the language (starttext and stoptext), with no packages and no long, inconsistent settings.
- Everything is defined and configured in exactly the same way.
- The complete Metapost language for drawing is fundamentally included, and TikZ is easy to implement.
And I haven’t even mentioned XML and filtering options yet.

The math typesetting is far superior to anything LaTeX could ever offer. Also, before I forget: Lua is fully integrated.

Let me be clear: I see no reason whatsoever—other than “it’s the industry standard”—why one wouldn’t use Context instead of LaTeX (which, in my opinion, is clearly outdated once you’ve tried Context).

Hi,

We packaged a font so it can be reusable in different documents (see below).

1. Is it the right way to do it? Comments welcome. The package is then used by simply adding \usepackage{ourfont}. We tried to look at various font packages but it seems to vary much between implementations...

2. In a document (so without modifying the package), we want to disable ligatures for non-italic, or maybe just disable the Discretionary ones, tbd. Again, what is the right way to do this?

This font (legally) comes from Adobe and is split into several .otf files for weight/style/optical sizes, hence the complexity of the loading...

This is first way we do this, and fontspec seems to offer many solutions. All comments welcome.

Thanks.

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{ourfont}[2026-06-28]

\RequirePackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont{OurFont}[
  NFSSFamily = OurFont,
  Numbers = {OldStyle,Proportional},
  Ligatures = {Common,Discretionary},
  UprightFeatures = {
    Font = *,
    SizeFeatures = {
      {Size = -8.9, Font = *-Capt},
      {Size = 9.0-14.9, Font = *},
      {Size = 15.0-22.9, Font = *-Subh},
      {Size = 23.0-, Font = *-Disp},
    },
  },
  ItalicFeatures = {
    Font = *-It,
    SizeFeatures = {
      {Size = -8.9, Font = *-ItCapt},
      {Size = 9.0-14.9, Font = *-It},
      {Size = 15.0-22.9, Font = *-ItSubh},
      {Size = 23.0-, Font = *-ItDisp},
    },
  },
  BoldFeatures = {
    Font = *-Bd,
    SizeFeatures = {
      {Size = -8.9, Font = *-BdCapt},
      {Size = 9.0-14.9, Font = *-Bd},
      {Size = 15.0-22.9, Font = *-BdSubh},
      {Size = 23.0-, Font = *-BdDisp},
    },
  },
  BoldItalicFeatures = {
    Font = *-BdIt,
    SizeFeatures = {
      {Size = -8.9, Font = *-BdItCapt},
      {Size = 9.0-14.9, Font = *-BdIt},
      {Size = 15.0-22.9, Font = *-BdItSubh},
      {Size = 23.0-, Font = *-BdItDisp},
    },
  },
  FontFace = {l}{n}{
    Font = *-LtDisp,
  },
  FontFace = {l}{it}{
    Font = *-LtItDisp,
  },
  FontFace = {sb}{n}{
    Font = *-Smbd,
    SizeFeatures = {
      {Size = -8.9, Font = *-SmbdCapt},
      {Size = 9.0-14.9, Font = *-Smbd},
      {Size = 15.0-22.9, Font = *-SmbdSubh},
      {Size = 23.0-, Font = *-SmbdDisp},
    },
  },
  FontFace = {sb}{it}{
    Font = *-SmbdIt,
    SizeFeatures = {
      {Size = -8.9, Font = *-SmbdItCapt},
      {Size = 9.0-14.9, Font = *-SmbdIt},
      {Size = 15.0-22.9, Font = *-SmbdItSubh},
      {Size = 23.0-, Font = *-SmbdItDisp},
    },
  },
]

\def\rmdefault{OurFont}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\rmdefault}

https://preview.redd.it/f89oajtbld9h1.png?width=2584&format=png&auto=webp&s=82fed93d1ab3fe645a0352fab6be764cdf26dd28

I teach Aircraft Structures at a technical high school, and I write all my course material in LaTeX. What started as "let me tweak the colors a bit" turned into a full drop-in theme over a few weekends.

It's called Skywrite. The idea: technical notes that are actually pleasant to read. A cool blue-grey "drafting table" palette, colour-coded callout boxes (definition / theorem / proof / example / intuition / warning…) each with its own hand-drawn TikZ icon, a monograph-style cover, part dividers that open like book chapters with a big Garamond chapter number, and a matching pgfplots style so the graphs don't clash.

A few things I'm oddly proud of:

• Works on pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX — it detects the engine and loads fonts accordingly, so no "wrong compiler" headaches.
• Light and dark modes, five accent colours, Italian/English labels.
• A paper=white option for when you actually have to print and want to spare the toner.
• One self-indulgent detail: an automatic coffee-stain on the first section. Because of course.

One .sty file, a worked example, and a guide. Drop it next to your .tex, set one line, compile.

Repo (MIT licensed): https://github.com/braucci/skywrite

Happy to hear feedback — especially the rough edges. First time sharing something like this.

Is there a something like githubs track changes between versions but for instance can realize that there is absolutely zero difference in the latex output of what is below?

https://preview.redd.it/nx67vet9ep9h1.png?width=728&format=png&auto=webp&s=7aabb8179f51f446a3a7bf711a77a43100e9eccf

Lurking around this sub I have heard that latex is very old and slow for big projects, so I was wondering if there was another program that was more likely to be used in future industry that I should learn? If possible I would like to be able to code it within an IDE so I am not tied to a website or subscriptions. Thanks!