<story><title>Tectonic – A modern, complete, self-contained Tex engine with Unicode support</title><url>https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>weinzierl</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;It also claims reasonable error messages but I only ran it on  error-free files, so I cannot tell.&lt;p&gt;One small downside is that in my direct comparison with lualatex it was always marginally slower.&lt;p&gt;Another one is that it is not a rewrite but still based on the old TeX code.&lt;p&gt;I think tectonic is a great project but generally speaking I find it quite disappointing that we do not have 100% compatible LaTeX with a modern codebase. And that is not even because the old code is bad - not at all. It&amp;#x27;s just that a pure Rust or Java implementation would make it so much easier to integrate into other projects. An audited TeX core we could run on untrusted input would be another benefit.&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to my last point: When researching tectonic I found a fork that attempted a pure Rust port and it &lt;i&gt;nearly&lt;/i&gt; worked with examples. There is hope...*</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alerighi</author><text>Why rewrite TeX? To me TeX is one of the example of what a software project should aim to be, arrive to a stable version where it does what it should do and it work reasonably well. That was the initial idea of Knuth (in fact the version is a number that approaches PI one decimal at a time).&lt;p&gt;This is the contrary of the &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; philosophy that says that we need to constantly modify, update or rewrite a software in &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; languages even if it&amp;#x27;s a huge effort and risks introducing bugs that were not present in the original version.&lt;p&gt;Well, at least if we want to rewrite it let&amp;#x27;s just have to wait 10 years, then we can fed all the codebase to ChatGPT and ask for a new fancy Rust version!&lt;p&gt;Regarding of integration, TeX follows the (to me still relevant) UNIX philosophy that a software can be called by another software and the input&amp;#x2F;output communicates in a pipe. Nowadays we have even containers that let us distribute the software as a single unit so we don&amp;#x27;t have to worry about installing multiple files on a system. Not a big deal, in the end.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tectonic – A modern, complete, self-contained Tex engine with Unicode support</title><url>https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>weinzierl</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;It also claims reasonable error messages but I only ran it on  error-free files, so I cannot tell.&lt;p&gt;One small downside is that in my direct comparison with lualatex it was always marginally slower.&lt;p&gt;Another one is that it is not a rewrite but still based on the old TeX code.&lt;p&gt;I think tectonic is a great project but generally speaking I find it quite disappointing that we do not have 100% compatible LaTeX with a modern codebase. And that is not even because the old code is bad - not at all. It&amp;#x27;s just that a pure Rust or Java implementation would make it so much easier to integrate into other projects. An audited TeX core we could run on untrusted input would be another benefit.&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to my last point: When researching tectonic I found a fork that attempted a pure Rust port and it &lt;i&gt;nearly&lt;/i&gt; worked with examples. There is hope...*</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>convolvatron</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;typst.app&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;typst.app&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;not tex based, but uses CM fonts. I really think that trying to update the programming parts of TeX is necessary. sadly I&amp;#x27;m struggling with fonts in svg figures.&lt;p&gt;but to suddenly see applying effort in this area and getting real traction is treat. so many thanks for the luminaries that put up the last one, but maybe its time for some rework after 40 years.</text></comment>