Sorry for the delay in responding! Arash Esbati <[email protected]> writes:
> 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 😉 Of course, I mainly wanted to find out if there were already any ongoing plans. > 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? I was considering it, but then I found out that tectonic requires a specific project layout, meaning that everyone collaborating on a document would have to use tectonic. For that reason, I don't suppose that I will be using it. > Best, Arash > > Footnotes: > [1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic > [2] https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/base/ltnews40.pdf
