tex2svg

This program listens on port 9292 for a GET or POST request containing a TeX fragment representing a Tikz picture. It returns a rendering of the picture as an SVG document.

There are two request parameters:

type: [ tikzpicture | tikzcd ]
tex: the body of the picture (i.e., everything after the \begin{tikzpicture} and before the \end{tikzpicture}). If you need some non-default Tikz libraries, you can embed a \usetikzlibrary{...} in your tex.

The type parameter is optional, and defaults to tikzpicture.

Docker

The easiest way to deploy this program is using Docker. To create a Docker image,

docker build -t=tex2svg .

Then you can either run the image locally, using

docker run -d -p 9292:9292 tex2svg

or deploy it to a remote server

docker save tex2svg | gzip > tex2svg.tar.gz
scp tex2svg.tar.gz <server-address>:<path-to-tex2svg.tar.gz>

followed by

gunzip -c <path-to-tex2svg.tar.gz> | docker load
docker run -d -p 9292:9292 tex2svg

on the server.

The size of the Docker image is 1.09 GB, which is very modest compared to (just!) a full texlive installation.

Heroku

Heroku also support Docker deployments,

heroku apps:create [APPNAME]
heroku stack:set container -a [APPNAME]
git push heroku master

Alternatively you can install it manually, as follows.

Installation

The program requires a working TeX installation and the pdf2svg commandline application (which, in turn, requires the poppler-glib library).

• Customize the locations of pdflatex and pdf2svg in the config.yml file. (Other configuration options include what interfaces the program binds to and what port it listens on.)
• Run the command

bundle install --path vendor/bundle

Running

Then you can start the server with

bundle exec rackup

or

bundle exec rackup --daemon

to run it as a daemon.

Only a subset of TeX commands are supported, in addition to the command supported by tikzpicture/tikzcd.

Testing

The test suite is still a little sparse. You can run the tests with

bundle exec rake test