Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

Using LaTeX makes sense because that's what all journals and conferences expect.

I'm writing two books, both in LaTeX.

I really don't get what the problem is.

Using LaTeX is mostly fine, except for the endless compile times, useless error messages, lack of unicode, etc. like the GP said.

I'm maintaining an internally used LaTeX document class and the development experience is even worse. TeX has no concept of such avant-garde ideas like lists, dictionaries, or namespaces. Things break all the time, and sometimes only when you load three specific packages in a specific order because they all patch each other's routines. I still haven't completely groked the idea of fragile commands and expanding macros. Characters can change meaning depending on context, even the `comment` character (%) or the `escape` character (\), (and I believe even the curly braces) for example when used inside `\path{}` or `\url{}` [1]. It makes a difference whether you comment out line endings or not. The LaTeX3 syntax looks like a bad joke. I mean, look at it:

\ExplSyntaxOn \tl_set:Nn \l_tmpa_tl {A} \group_begin: \tl_set:Nn \l_tmpa_tl {B} \par value~inside~group:~\tl_use:N \l_tmpa_tl \group_end: \par value~outside~group:~\tl_use:N \l_tmpa_tl

\tl_set:Nn \l_tmpb_tl {A} \group_begin: \tl_gset:Nn \l_tmpb_tl {B} \par value~inside~group:~\tl_use:N \l_tmpb_tl \group_end: \par value~outside~group:~\tl_use:N \l_tmpb_tl \ExplSyntaxOff

????

Let's just let it retire and focus our efforts on Typst and pushing publishers to accept Typst.

[1] Just look at all these poor souls trying to achieve something as exotic as putting a URL with a percent sign inside a footnote: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/12230/getting-percen...

> However, the build process for XeTeX (and all other mainstream TeX engines) is extremely baroque

(Disclaimer: I'm on the TeX Live team)

Yes, the build process is rather unusual internally, but this is pretty well insulated from the user. The "standard" build commands used by lots of other open source projects

  git clone […] && ./configure && make

should mostly just work, and give you a functioning TeX engine at the end. The full steps are listed at [0] if you're interested in more details though. And TeX Live is regularly built on essentially every platform imaginable [1], so it's pretty unlikely that you'll ever need to work with the low-level build system.

And only some of the engines require this complex build process; LuaTeX is the recommended engine these days [2], and it's written entirely in C (with a few C++ libraries), and it uses a standard autotools build process [3].

> One of the big motivators for the launch of the Tectonic project was to break out of this ridiculously unwelcoming development process.

TeX development is pretty welcoming in my personal experience: the first time that I built TL (~5 years ago), I was able to follow the official instructions without any problems, and I got a working TeX engine by the end of it. And it was only 2 or 3 years after that that I became an "official" member of the TL team, so I like to think that the development process is fairly welcoming.

But if you have any suggestions on what we can do better, please let me know, either by replying to this comment or to the email address linked in my profile.

> Tectonic is based on the C/C++ files that emerge from the XeTeX build process

I haven't looked at the Tectonic source, but the problem is that the C code generated by Web2C is fairly unreadable, so it's not really very usable as source code.

> While the core TeX architecture and XeTeX are largely stable, they do, however, evolve with time.

XeTeX is essentially frozen for the time being [4], unless someone steps up to maintain it. We are cautiously optimistic regarding LLMs though: they seem to be fairly decent at writing WEB code, and since even the TL development team only has 2 developers who are proficient in WEB, we'll take any help that we can get. (We don't have any non-trivial AI-written code yet, but it's definitely something that we're looking into)

[0]: https://tug.org/texlive/build.html

[1]: https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah/

[2]: https://www.latex-project.org/news/2024/11/01/issue40-of-lat...

[3]: https://gitlab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/texlive/luatex

[4]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/755239/270600

> except for the endless compile times, useless error messages, lack of unicode, etc.

Some of these have been fixed; see my sibling comment [0] for more details.

> TeX has no concept of such avant-garde ideas like lists, dictionaries, or namespaces. […]. The LaTeX3 syntax looks like a bad joke.

But that is in fact the entire purpose of LaTeX3. I agree that the syntax looks intimidating, but it's actually quite nice once you learn it, and it's written that way to provide namespacing in TeX. Similarly, LaTeX3 defines lists, dictionaries, and most other conventional datastructures.

> Things break all the time, and sometimes only when you load three specific packages in a specific order because they all patch each other's routines.

Hmm, well it depends. The LaTeX kernel and the TeX engines are more stable than nearly all other software, but the third-party packages do indeed break occasionally. But you see similar dynamics play out in most other ecosystems: JavaScript the language is incredibly stable and has excellent backwards compatibility, but if you use 50+ third-party packages, then things do indeed break occasionally.

> Characters can change meaning depending on context

Much like operator overloading in other languages, catcode changes in TeX can indeed be misused and are sometimes confusing, but they're also a pretty useful solution to problems that would otherwise be tricky to solve.

All this isn't to say that TeX doesn't have issues—I criticize LaTeX myself fairly frequently—but most of these are due to the fact that LaTeX is 40-year-old software built on a 50-year-old engine, and has remained backwards-compatible with documents throughout that entire time. And La(TeX) is slowly modernizing, so I'm fairly hopeful that things will continue to improve.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515090

While Typst appears to be popular, I think that TeXmacs, https://www.texmacs.org/, which is a program independent from both TeX and Emacs, is the kind of program that we need for writing: a fully WYSIWYG, fully structured document preparation system, in which you edit the structure of your document in a WYSIWYG way. When editing the structure on-screen, the user has no need to be aware that is doing so, as it looks like they are editing a text document; at the same time, the TeXmacs editor will guide the user to keeping a structured document.