Tectonic – TeX/LaTeX Engine in Rust

I looked into this project when it was first announced. The “in Rust” part seems more aspirational than reality. For those who may not know, Knuth originally wrote TeX in a language called WEB, which is basically Pascal with some preprocessors for making it usable and documentable. Later extensions to TeX, including eTeX, pdfTeX and XeTeX have also been written in WEB. The existing TeX distributions (TeX Live, MikTeX, etc), at their core first translate this WEB/Pascal into (autogenerated and…

I used it a bit recently and it is brilliant. Instead of lugging a huge TeX installation around you have a single reasonably sized binary. When you run ’tectonic file.tex’ it will download everything it needs on the fly. If you want to run it without internet access you can sort of freeze the downloaded files and run tectonic with your *.tex plus the frozen bundle. It also claims reasonable error messages but I only ran it on error-free files…

Co-maintainer here. Tectonic is a cool project, but hasn't seen any significant changes in a few years---and likely won't anytime soon. It seems we maintainers don't have the time and motivation to put serious work into Tectonic. I haven't looked at the code in years (and thus may be wrong), but here's a quick overview: Tectonic's code consists of thin bindings to /harfbuzz/graphite/etc and a vendored XeTeX (in C, with some tweaks to make the build easier), driven by Rust…

The latest version of Tectonic is 0.15.0 (i.e. pre-release), and is dated February 5, 2024. Looking at the contributions on GitHub [1], there's not much activity happening in the repo. Frankly, there are better ways to get and use TeX and friends (i.e. LaTeX, XeTeX, XeLaTeX, etc.); see https://www.latex-project.org/get/ [1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/graphs/cont...