For this reason we will keep our free cloud typesetting servers running as a core part of the product because without the ability to use all of LaTeX’s features, Texpad would be incomplete.Īn exciting opportunity created by this project is that we now have TeX in C, ready to be refactored into a readable and maintainable form. No one will thank us for an iPad app that size, so although we are expanding Texpad bundled packages in coming updates, it will always lack at least some of TexLive’s packages and abilities.
TEXPAD PDEFTEX FULL
The fly in the ointment for any iPad TeX is that the full TexLive 2012 distribution takes up approximately 4GB. Nevertheless, once this was all hidden behind an Objective-C interface, we at last had LaTeX running natively on iOS. You can imagine the state of C code automatically generated from Pascal which was written in an era when it seems that all arguments were passed to functions as global variables, hence these very minor alterations took quite some time. Unfortunately, a few tweaks were necessary to the C source to make TeX play nicely with iOS. In order to build TeX into iOS you need to build Tangle for the desktop, translate TeX’s WEB source to C, then build those C files for iOS. The Tangle executable extracts the Pascal and translates it to C ready for compilation, whilst the Weave executable creates TeX files from the embedded documentation. The build process is quirky, but clear as it carefully separates building the WEB-to-C translator from building TeX itself from the translated WEB source, which makes it very easy to extract the relevant C files and build them into an iOS binary.įor those out of the loop, TeX was written in the WEB literate programming language, in which code consists of a mix of documentation and Pascal on equal footing. Consequently it is faster, smaller, embeddable and the distribution’s directory structure is much simpler.
It is unencumbered by GPLed code and it does not use TeXLive’s atrocious Kpathsea library. The secret this time around was KerTeX, a little known TeX distribution being developed by Thierry Laronde.
TEXPAD PDEFTEX UPDATE
Having written a blogpost some time ago about our first failed attempt I will write an update with how we did it. Today marks the end of a longterm project for us as the 1.1 update of Texpad makes it to the iPad App Store with the ability to typeset LaTeX onboard the iPad.
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