High-Performance LaTeX Paper Renderer

Built a high-performance renderer for LaTeX academic papers at ScienceStack, solving a hard problem: papers parsed as recursive JSON trees were crashing browsers on anything over a few hundred pages.

The root cause was a naive full-render approach that held the entire document in the DOM simultaneously. The fix required rethinking the rendering pipeline from the ground up.

I designed a tree-flattening algorithm that converts nested section structures into typed block arrays, separating inline from block tokens. This preserved the semantic hierarchy while enabling efficient virtualization, something recursive trees can't support directly.

On top of that, I built a progressive offscreen rendering strategy using React Fiber scheduling and idle callbacks. The first 20 visible blocks render instantly; the rest are pre-computed in the background without blocking the main thread.

Each block's measured DOM size gets committed into a persistent height map, making scroll position and rendering fully deterministic across any paper regardless of length.

The result: smooth scrolling and near-zero memory footprint on 500+ page documents, replacing a renderer that was actively crashing user browsers.