tectonic

Warning! This is not an official snap for Tectonic.

Tectonic is a modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine, powered by XeTeX and TeXLive.

For those new to it, TeX is a programming language that you use to create typeset documents rather than computer software. TeX is quite archaic in some ways, but it’s still the tool of choice for documents that require precision typography or ones that involve lots of mathematical equations, which makes it especially important in the sciences. Tectonic converts TeX files into PDF files.

What’s in it for me?

Tectonic automatically downloads support files so you don’t have to install a full LaTeX system in order to start using it. If you start using a new LaTeX package, Tectonic just pulls down the files it needs and continues processing. The underyling “bundle” technology allows for completely reproducible document compiles. Thanks to the Dataverse Project for hosting the large LaTeX resource files! Tectonic has sophisticated logic and automatically loops TeX and BibTeX as needed, and only as much as needed. In its default mode it doesn’t write TeX’s intermediate files and always produces a fully-processed document. The tectonic command-line program is quiet and never stops to ask for input. Thanks to the power of XeTeX, Tectonic can use modern OpenType fonts and is fully Unicode-enabled. The Tectonic engine has been extracted into a completely self-contained library so that it can be embedded in other applications. Tectonic has been forked from the old-fashioned WEB2C implementation of TeX and is developed in the open on GitHub using modern tools like the Rust language. Tectonic can be used from Github Actions to typeset your documents whenever a change to them is made: setup-tectonic - Use tectonic in your github action workflows (supports caching and optionally biber) compile-latex - Thanks to Vinay Sharma for creating the action.