mathtex

mathtex runs the XeTeX engine itself, translated to Rust, and hands you the finished layout as an intermediate representation (IR).

TeX's own layout. All math comes straight from XeTeX's own algorithms.
Runs anywhere Rust runs. Native and wasm32-unknown-unknown, with no TeX install.
Made for editors. Every glyph maps back to the input that produced it.
Safe with user input. Each formula runs sandboxed from a fresh copy of the format, with a work budget, no file access and structured errors.
Fast. A few milliseconds per formula in a release build.

Quick start

Bake LaTeX code into formats, then typeset as many formulas as it is needed. The following code displays a basic use of the library:

use mathtex_engine::{
    Format, FormatBuilder, MathMode, NoHostBoxes, Options, ResourceFontLoader, TexmfResources,
    Typesetter,
};

let texmf = TexmfResources::discover()?;
let fonts = ResourceFontLoader::new(&texmf);
let bytes = FormatBuilder::new(
    r"\documentclass{article}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{unicode-math}\setmathfont{latinmodern-math.otf}\begin{document}",
)
.kernel("latex.ltx")
.build(&texmf, &fonts)?;

let mut typesetter = Typesetter::new(Format::from_owned(bytes)?, fonts, Options::default())?;
let typeset = typesetter.typeset(r"\frac{a}{b}+\sqrt{x}", MathMode::Display, &NoHostBoxes)?;
let svg = mathtex_svg::render(&typeset.fragment, &outlines, &mathtex_svg::SvgOptions::default());

Ship the format with your app and parse them with Format::from_static.

Note: A format belongs to the engine build that baked it, and any other build will be refused to load.

Development

tools/fetch-test-fixtures.sh
cargo test --workspace
cargo run -p mathtex-svg-cli -- 'x^2+y' out.svg

Tests read Computer Modern TFMs and sample fonts from a small sparse clone of the pinned texlive-source commit, which the fetch script creates in the gitignored cache/ directory. The LaTeX, unicode-math and oracle tests also need an installed TeX Live, found through MATHTEX_TEXMF_ROOT or kpsewhich. Missing sources skip with a notice, and MATHTEX_REQUIRE_FIXTURES=1 or MATHTEX_REQUIRE_TEXLIVE=1 make them fail instead.

Web demo

There is a web demo in web/. It can be built with wasm-pack build crates/mathtex-wasm --target web. To dump its format, run node tools/build-format/dump.mjs. It can be end-to-end tested with node test/e2e.mjs.

Regenerating the engine

generated/portable-engine is produced entirely by tools/web2c-import from the XeTeX sources.
tools/bootstrap-texlive-web2c-c2rust.sh rebuilds those inputs from a texlive-source clone.
tools/patch-translated-engine.sh regenerates the engine after a change to the patcher or runtime/prelude.rs.in.
tools/check-regen.sh fails when the committed engine differs from a fresh regeneration.

License