Hey everyone! I wanted to share a native desktop app I've been building to learn Qt6 development.

Tilde is built in C++ and uses pdflatex to compile, but instead of relying on a heavy Chromium webview for the UI, it uses QtPdf for rendering. This keeps it lightweight, avoids Electron/WebEngine bloat, and saves a massive amount of RAM.

It also compiles the live preview directly from the editor's memory rather than local storage, so you don't have to constantly hit save just to see your math render.

It is still actively in development, but I would love for you to try it out or check out the code and tell me your suggestions!

Credits: Clemens Lode laid the foundation of this approach and proved with his TUG talks that it can work. This is an independent way to implement it. His paper (https://tug.org/tug2026/preprints/lode-realtime.pdf) describes a lot of details also.

A lot of the time spent compiling LaTeX is wasted on three things (roughly 70 percent of the total compile time):

1. Starting the LaTeX engine from cold
2. Loading the preamble, fonts, and other resources
3. Writing the PDF

Typesetting itself, especially of words and math, is extremely fast and can happen in real time, but it is dragged down by those slow steps. So all a real-time renderer needs to do is eliminate them.

How do we get rid of them? Separate compilation into two paths: a real-time path and a background full recompile with 2 LuaLaTeX processes.

For the real-time path:

• Keep the LaTeX engine warm. The engine never reaches \end{document}, so it always stays running. (This makes (1) and (2) a one time cost)
• This warm engine then retypesets only the edited paragraph, which takes milliseconds.

However, an engine that never reaches \end{document} can never produce a PDF.

To fix this PDF problem, we need a custom renderer that draws LaTeX's internal format directly. Every document is ultimately composed of roughly 11 primitive node types: glyph, kern, glue, rule, hlist, vlist, and so on. The custom renderer's job is to draw those nodes onto a canvas. This skips (3) entirely as a byproduct.

The background path takes its time and runs a full recompile, which ensures document for the elements not real-time renderable.

Now, why LuaLaTeX? LuaLaTeX supports \directlua, which makes it extremely easy to inject custom scripts that keep the engine warm and expose the internal format.

A more detailed explanation is here: https://github.com/texpile/texpile/blob/master/docs/ARCHITECTURE.md

Edit: implementation demo video: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7a2d7997-fe6c-4837-bbe5-1aaa5e0c90b7

Generative AI disclosure: the Markdown file was written with the assistance of generative AI, and I have reviewed it for correctness.

Seems there is an unusually large number of TeXLive updates today. I update when I think about it, but usually that's before I reboot for a kernel update and I believe I did that earlier this month.

Is this a result of the recent TeX conference?

Not saying I mind, it's just rare for me to see over 200 in an update let alone over 800.

Dear LaTeX experts,

I'm a linguist. I'm working on a LaTeX-formatted book in which two versions of the same text will be displayed in two columns alongside each other: the original French text, and the English translation (for the sake of comparison). Here's the problem:

Since the French and English paragraphs may be very different lengths (due to translation), I want to have each paragraph of the text begin at the same height on the page, and so on for the proceeding paragraphs. I'm not sure how to achieve this in LaTeX using anything other than a table; I could use a table, but then the table would have to be hundreds of pages long. Are there any tricks I could use to achieve this? Here's a diagram of what I want the formatting to look like, hopefully it isn't too patronising:

Any help would be most appreciated ✨

WASM-based editors have two major advantages: a) there is nothing to install on your local machine, and b) compilation can be roughly ten times faster than with conventional services that compile on a server, such as Overleaf or Prism.

Apparently, a lot of people have had the same idea, because new WASM-based LaTeX editors keep appearing. I ended up contributing to the problem by building one myself. (sorry)

However, there is a large gap between a working prototype and a product that people can actually use.

The components required to build a working prototype are surprisingly simple:

• A code editor, such as Monaco Editor
• A LaTeX-to-PDF compiler, such as SwiftLaTeX/pdflatex
• A PDF renderer, such as PDF.js

But once you have built only that much, it becomes difficult to answer questions like these:

• If I am editing by myself, why should I do it on the web?
• How do I use the enormous number of packages available in TeX Live?
• How do I use other engines, such as LuaTeX, for CJK support and other requirements?
• How do I insert images?

So what needs to be implemented before it becomes something people can actually use?

• Real-time collaborative editing using WebSockets or a similar mechanism, probably along with commenting and review features
• Support for multiple TeX engines
• Hosting different versions of TeX Live through a CDN or similar infrastructure
• Version control or Git integration
• In-editor autocompletion, syntax diagnostics, and refactoring support, which requires proper Language Server Protocol integration
• Search and replace across multiple files—surprisingly, neither Prism nor Overleaf currently supports this
• Support for related file types such as .bib and .sty
• Image uploading through drag and drop, copy and paste, and other methods, as well as image hosting
• Server-side processing for extensions that are too heavy or difficult to run in WASM—for example, running Biber or xindy in the browser is not straightforward
• Bidirectional synchronization between the source and the PDF: clicking the PDF should take you to the corresponding LaTeX source, while moving the caret in the source should highlight the corresponding region in the PDF

The fact that almost anyone can now quickly build a prototype that works about 80% of the way is undoubtedly meaningful and beneficial. I simply wanted to point out that there is still a substantial gap between a prototype and a product.

Does that mean what I built is a finished product? Of course not. I have spent about two months refining it so far, and I expect it to improve gradually after a few more months of work. Then again, I do not think software is ever truly finished.

In software development, "perfect" is a verb, not an adjective. There is no perfect process. There is no perfect design. There are no perfect stories. You can, however, perfect your process, your design, and your stories.

--Kent Beck, Extreme programming explained

Background: I want to reconfigure my church's bulletin "system" to make it easier to produce every week. We currently use Word and PowerPoint to make the standard bulletin, large print bulletin, script for the readers, and the slideshow. Copy/paste screws up the formatting more often than not, and the formatting is uneven, hard to read, and just crappy in general.

While I'm sure there's a reasonable fix available in Word, I much prefer TeX/LaTeX, and being able to import music from Lilypond will make that part much easier, too.

So my question: is there a way to format individual files to pull data from a "master" file that includes all the changing variables (e.g. scriptures, hymns, responsive readings)? Then I only need to edit one document. I've seen things like catchfilesbetweentags and latexdb, but I'm not sure if they're designed to work this way.

Or, my other idea was to have everything in one big document with all the variables at the beginning, each format in its own section, and just use block comments to choose which version I want to print.

Would either of these solutions work?

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I've been working on an Overleaf alternative called CorTeX:

https://cortex.borca.ai

The main goal is to provide a fast, browser-based LaTeX editing experience while still supporting tools that are difficult to run entirely in WebAssembly.

Current features include:

• pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, and LuaLaTeX support
• A WebAssembly-based TeX engine that runs in the browser
• Incremental compilation
• Hybrid client/server compilation: tools such as Biber and xindy run on the server, and the results are returned to the browser
• Monaco Editor with decent language-server support
• Real-time collaborative editing
• Collaborator invitations, reviews, and comments
• Version control
• Conference and journal templates
• Paste images directly into a document
• Project-wide search and replace
• Markdown editing with Mermaid support
• Automatic synchronization between positions in the LaTeX source and the generated PDF
• An LLM-based assistant for LaTeX writing and editing

It is still under active development, so I’d appreciate any feedback, bug reports, or suggestions.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think. I'm actively developing CorTeX and are very open to suggestions, so if you have ideas for improvements or features you'd like to see, I'll seriously consider incorporating them.

[FYI] The WASM-based TeX engine is open source and available here: https://github.com/corca-ai/wasmtex

Hello everyone, in the last two weeks, I started creating the tex editor called PanTeX. This is an Overleaf-like editor that can install in your local computer. I used and improved it in parallel for 2 weeks. Now it is quite stable. So, I would like to share this with the LaTeX community. Anyone who has muscle memory from Overleaf can use it easily. AND IT IS FREE!!. This is the link: https://gitlab.com/panasun.pu/pantex

It would be nice if you could try it and comment or even complain to me :)

Cheers!

It felt like the presentation focused more on promoting the upcoming platform than on discussing ways to help the LaTeX community grow, which I found a bit disappointing.

I was also saddened that there don't seem to be plans to open-source the project (or parts of it), especially given how much it builds on decades of open-source contributions from the community.

Did anyone else come away with a similar impression?

In any case, this made me think that perhaps the community should work toward a comparable solution that is integrated directly into LuaLaTeX.

As a daily LaTeX user, I recently built a lightweight, fast text engine that provides paginated preview and PDF export for both TeX and Markdown.

It currently supports a subset of LaTeX features that I use most often, including parts of TikZ, figures, equations, cross-references, and bibliographies. It’s not meant to be a full replacement for LaTeX, but it’s very fast (around ~500 ms per update) and runs entirely in the browser. For me, it works well as a preview tool before compiling with a full LaTeX distribution.

You can try it out here: https://slxuphys.github.io/vector/. You can simply copy paste your tex file into one of the example there. I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a shot and shared your thoughts.

It has been a fun personal project. I’m continuing to expand LaTeX coverage. I may explore incremental layout in the future to make it faster, but 500ms rendering time already feels enough for myself.

Hi LaTeX community! 👋

I've created custom builds of **TeXstudio** with **Qt6** and **Poppler-Qt6** for modern Linux distributions, addressing the lack of official Qt6 builds for Linux.

## Why this project?

The official TeXstudio builds still primarily use Qt5 (which reached end-of-life in May 2025), and Linux users have been waiting for proper Qt6 support. These custom builds provide:

✅ **Qt6 framework** - Modern UI/UX with better performance

✅ **Poppler-Qt6 native PDF viewer** - Perfect SyncTeX support (click to jump between PDF and source)

✅ **Optimized packages** - Only ~19MB (66% smaller than standard builds)

✅ **GPG-signed packages** - Full security verification

✅ **Auto-updates** - Built-in update checker pointing to this repository

## 📦 Installation Options

### Option 1: APT Repository (Recommended for Debian/Ubuntu/Devuan)

**Stable branch** (production-ready):

```bash

echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://mlmateos.github.io/texstudio-qt6-builds/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/texstudio.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install texstudio

```

**Alpha branch** (latest development versions):

```bash

echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://mlmateos.github.io/texstudio-qt6-builds/ alpha main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/texstudio.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install texstudio

```

### Option 2: AppImage (Any Linux distribution)

Download from [Releases](https://github.com/mlmateos/texstudio-qt6-builds/releases) and run:

```bash

chmod +x texstudio-*.AppImage

./texstudio-*.AppImage

```

### Option 3: Direct .deb download

Grab the latest `.deb` package from [GitHub Releases](https://github.com/mlmateos/texstudio-qt6-builds/releases)

## 🔧 Build from Source

Automated build scripts are available if you want to compile your own version:

```bash

git clone https://github.com/mlmateos/texstudio-qt6-builds.git

cd texstudio-qt6-builds/scripts

./build-texstudio-deb.sh --clean --poppler --sign

```

## 📋 Current Versions

- **Stable**: 4.9.5

- **Development**: 4.9.6-beta3

## 🔗 Links

- **GitHub Repository**: https://github.com/mlmateos/texstudio-qt6-builds

- **Releases**: https://github.com/mlmateos/texstudio-qt6-builds/releases

- **APT Repository**: https://mlmateos.github.io/texstudio-qt6-builds

## 💡 Features

- Syntax highlighting & auto-completion

- Integrated PDF viewer with native SyncTeX

- Spell checking (Hunspell)

- Live preview

- Custom credits & patched update URLs

- Preserved dictionaries: en_US, en_GB, es_ES, es_MX, fr_FR

## 🤝 Feedback Welcome!

This is an **unofficial build** (not endorsed by the official TeXstudio project). I'd love to hear your feedback, bug reports, or feature suggestions!

**Tested on**: Debian 12, Devuan 5, Ubuntu 22.04+

Happy TeXing! 🎓

---

A little promotion for my own project 😄
VisualTeX — A Visual LaTeX Equation Editor
If you find it useful, please consider giving the project a star! 🙏🙏
GitHub:
https://github.com/paulhe666/visualtex
If GitHub is inaccessible in your region, you can visit the official project website instead:
https://visualtex.pauljianliao.com/
Key Features:
Visual LaTeX equation editing with real-time two-way synchronization
Fast, fully local OCR recognition for equations in images
Word and PowerPoint add-ins for both Windows and macOS
Direct insertion of native Word OMML equations
Support for OLE equation insertion and cross-references
Support for inserting equations into PowerPoint in SVG and OLE formats

I wanted to give an update on the real-time lualatex editor I was working on in the last few months (previous thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1qteil1/lualatex_rendering_in_realtime/ ).

What's new since February:

1. Development went well, and I turned the proof-of-concept into a full editor, I aim to release it in October (online).
2. I am still using vanilla TeX Live 2025 with full microtypography and OpenType shaping, no engine modification (just a lot of wiring around it).
3. What you see in the demo (skip to 14:24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It9BMNGtjao&t=864s ):
   • Typing in a long chapter with instant paragraph recompiles
   • Bidirectional source - preview cursor sync (click a glyph, jump to the source character)
   • Adjusting tables and images in real time
   • Drag-reordering paragraphs with instant reflow
4. It now runs in the browser against a server, so the "Linux only, local install required" limitation from the original thread is gone.
5. As there was a long debate here about whether TeX can match Typst's (0.14) incremental compilation, I wrote a few benchmarks (recompilation of a single 4-5 line paragraph):
   • 10 pages: 1ms (texlode), 12.6ms Typst
   • 100 pages: 1ms (texlode), 76ms Typst
   • 300 pages: 1ms (texlode), 206ms Typst
6. Limitations are of course constructed edge cases (very long paragraphs, page-sized tables, two-column pages etc.). There, the recompilation time is proportionally longer. Biber gives me some headache, but that's a different discussion.
7. On Typst-side, the constant-time case is "not feasible to implement" in their architecture (issue #4512). (although I personally think it's possible, but I am not that deep into Typst architecture).

Slides: https://www.tug.org/tug2026/av/d2-t15-lode-realtime/d2-t15-lode-realtime-slides.pdf

Preprint: https://www.tug.org/tug2026/preprints/lode-realtime.pdf

PS: Btw, thanks to the TUG team for allowing me to present today :) Consider to join at https://www.tug.org/ (I'm not affiliated with TUG except for giving the talk)

Meron kayang naghahanap ng maglalatex ng documents nila? Or anything? Pandagdag allowance lang sana. Please please please.

This is my preamble which puts the chapter name on the left page and section name on the right page at the top as well as the title of the book throughout it allows for an index and table of contents auto generated:

I recently defended my diploma thesis using Beamer slides with speaker notes on side.

My PDF was generated using:

\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen=right}

Pympress worked well, but afterward I wondered whether the same presentation setup could work directly in a browser, without installing a dedicated PDF presenter.

So I made backstage_:

https://bckstg.xyz

You drop in the split-screen Beamer PDF, click Present and open the Audience view by clicking the button top right. The app keeps the speaker-notes view in the original window and opens the audience slides in a separate window, which you can move to a projector or share in a video call.

The PDF is handled locally in the browser and is not uploaded.

This is an early version. I have used it successfully for another presentation, but I have not tested it thoroughly across different browsers, operating systems, projectors, and unusual Beamer files yet.

I would really appreciate feedback from anyone who regularly presents Beamer slides:

• Does it work with your PDFs?
• Is the setup understandable?
• Are there browser or display configurations that break it?
• Would you find a browser-based tool like this useful, or do existing desktop tools already cover your needs?

I would still recommend rehearsing before trusting any new presentation tool for an important talk.