WebTeX

ASP .NET Server for Serving JIT Compiled LaTeX using ELDYN

Description

WebTeX is a demo project to demonstrate how ELDYN can be used to JIT-compile dynamic LaTeX content and serve it to a user. To demonstrate this, the NASA APOD API is used to generate a LaTeX page according to the ELDYN templates.

Recommendations

This project directly returns the PDF as a response. This can cause problems in some browsers, where the content is not displayed inside the browser. In those cases the content is downloaded and only visible when the user opens the downloaded PDF. In addition, to support acting on form data (textfields, checkboxes, buttons inside the PDF), it is recommended to display the PDF inside a context window. An embed in HTML could allow hot-reloads and redirects after posts (to a new dynamically generated PDF via LaTeX), for example.

Prerequisites

A TeX distribution must be installed. TeX Live was utilized for this project and can be installed by running sudo apt-get install texlive-full. WebTeX utilizes Eldyn. Prior to running chmod +x ELDYN-lin-x64 should be performed. Otherwise WebTeX will not have the required permission to launch Eldyn and start the file manipulation.

Run

• Operating System: Linux Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
• Start Server: chmod +x WebTeX ./WebTeX or nohup ./WebTeX to run in background and allow closing SSH.
• Reverse Proxy: Utilized nginx to forward to localhost configuration.
• Certificate: Utilized certbot to install a Let's Encrypt certificate: sudo apt-get install certbot python3-certbot-nginx sudo certbot --nginx -d webtex.nl

Thank you for using WebTeX

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