As a LaTeX user that occasionally needs to use Microsoft Word, I often convert LaTeX math equations to images to include them in the documents. Let’s build something to make it easy!
I came up with Node.js web app that allows LaTeX math equations to be entered and converted to PNG/JPG/SVG images.
For each conversion, Node.js starts an isolated Docker container with a LaTeX installation; it compiles the generated .tex file and converts it to an SVG vector image. If required, the SVG file is then converted to a raster image format for PNG/JPG.
Bootstrap and jQuery are used in the web interface, with AJAX calls made to the conversion API endpoint.
It made sense to use Docker as, well, LaTeX is powerful. Reading and writing external files and executing terminal commands are possible, and easy to exploit.
The isolated Docker container started for each conversion is only able to access the local temp/<id>/ directory and has no network access.
Additionally, the compilation process will be killed after 5 seconds if not complete; this is to safeguard against infinite loops and other troublesome LaTeX quirks.
Use it
The app is up and running at latex2image.joeraut.com.
Source code
The source code is available on GitHub.
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