I’d like to announce the release of version 0.1.5 of Tectonic, a complete, modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine. TeX is a language for precision typography of technical documents.

I’ve been working on this under the radar for a while, but I think it’s progressed far enough where it’s time to start advertising it a bit more widely.

Right now, Tectonic primarily delivers a command-line client that replaces standard TeX engines. Unlike other TeX engines, Tectonic:

Downloads resource files from the internet on-the-fly, preventing the need for a massive install tree of TeX files

Automatically and intelligently loops TeX and BibTeX to produce finished documents repeatably

Has a command-line program that is quiet and never stops to ask for input

Supports modern OpenType fonts and Unicode

It is delivered as a Rust crate that can be embedded in a variety of other contexts; the Rust API wraps ~120,000 lines of C/C++ code. Tectonic is derived from the XeTeX extension of the standard WEB2C TeX engines. The pre-built bundles of support files are from TeXLive and hosted by JFrog Bintray.

Current areas of work are:

Reducing the dependence on system libraries to make the code easier to install and more portable

Gradual refactoring of the backing code to not be such a mess (seriously, you don’t even want to know)

Adding support for modern HTML output

This last item is something I’ve been working towards for several years. When the pieces come together, I believe that Tectonic will be able to reproducibly typeset technical documents with best-in-the-world output to both PDF and web-browser formats. It will take some time to get there, though.

Here’s the GitHub repo:

GitHub tectonic-typesetting/tectonic tectonic - A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine, powered by XeTeX and TeXLive.

Questions and contributions are welcome! I’d love to recruit folks who might be able to contribute to the project in any of a variety of ways. The GitHub issues page is the place to start.

Cheers,

Peter