Hi Philip, Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> writes:
> Hi, I was wondering if there ever were any plans to support Tectonic [0] > OOTB. For those who haven't heard of it, it is a kind of LaTeX > "distribution" based on XeTeX that downloads dependencies automatically, > but also has a custom toolchain. It is supposed to be neat if you > cannot install package dependencies on your own. Our plans are as always driven by direct demand of developers or users who preferably provide patches, but nobody stood up, until now 😉 I'm aware of Tectonic, but never installed and/or played with it. I think it is a pity that Tectonic is built upon XeTeX[1]: Much of the core code of Tectonic is derived from XeTeX, and we strive to track and maintain compatibility with upstream as much as possible. However, the nature of the Tectonic project is such that its source code is going to diverge from that of XeTeX over time. We can do our best to track the semantics of changes to XeTeX, but the expression of those changes in source form may well change greatly over time. This is from LTNews 40[2]: News from the “LATEX Tagged PDF” project Engine support: An important update As detailed below, work is progressing on the Tagged PDF project. There are many drivers for this work, including legal changes in many places which will increasingly require well-tagged PDFs including full support for mathematics. As part of the work on this, we are looking at the technical abilities of the TEX engines. With XETEX, it is impossible to reliably produce tagged PDFs due to engine limitations. The increasing importance of tagged PDFs means that this requires a move away from XETEX. We will continue to address issues with XETEX support in team-maintained LATEX code on a best-effort basis. No new functionality will be added for XETEX by the LATEX team. It is likely that over time functionality may become more restricted, and users are urged to migrate XETEX documents to LuaTEX. I can't tell if Tectonic's XeTeX is other than the upstream one, though. > They have some comments on how to use it in combination with AucTeX[1], > so perhaps it shouldn't be that difficult to upstream it, if the > proposed configuration is actually idiomatic and it is feasible for > AucTeX to detect that a system has Tectonic installed. I think it shouldn't be hard to provide support for Tectonic within AUCTeX, but I'd like to have somebody who uses the system and can test our changes. I remember the fun I had while adding LaTeXMk support to AUCTeX as a non-user of LaTeXMk. Do you use Tectonic? Best, Arash Footnotes: [1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic [2] https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/base/ltnews40.pdf
