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

tectonic-typesetting.github.io

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

#31

Post by __mharrison__ »

kxhbr wrote: post #6

Co-maintainer here. Tectonic is a cool project, but hasn't seen any significant changes in a few years---and likely won't anytime soon. It seems we maintainers don't have the time and motivation to put serious work into Tectonic. I haven't looked at the code in years (and thus may be wrong), but here's a quick overview: Tectonic's code consists of thin bindings to /harfbuzz/graphite/etc and a vendored XeTeX (in C, wi…

Typst is awesome. I've completed migrated and am happy to never have to touch LaTeX again. (Or have an AI write it.)

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

#32

Post by CJefferson »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #30
CJefferson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.

> I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them That is an option that you can enable. If you're only using a few different languages (which is by far the most typical case), it's mostly automatic with Babel (by using "\babelfont"), but if you really want to support everything , you can use something like [0] (which is admittedly rather convoluted). > just always having broken output as I use m…

That's genuinely good to know.

The thing that often hits me nowadays is using pandoc (or pandoc via quarto) to go markdown -> latex -> pdf, which tends to bury these issues (and in markdown it's more tempting to just write emojis / unicode maths symbols.

Why use markdown, because I want good HTML output (which I realise is getting better in latex, but still not as good as markdown -> HTML.

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

#33

Post by basro »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #25
mr_mitm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your insight, much appreciated! However, regarding this: > 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. I'm sorry, but I've never seen overloading of such fundamental characters like the comment character or escape character anywhere.…

> I'm sorry, but I've never seen overloading of such fundamental characters like the comment character or escape character anywhere. I believe that Racket [0], Mathematica [1], Raku [2], and Rust [3] let you assign arbitrary meanings to most symbols, but these are indeed much more restricted than TeX is (and for good reason). But the issue is really more that TeX barely supports lexical scoping, and that it lets you…

> I would be personally a little disappointed if Typst replaced LaTeX, but until that happens, I definitely hope that it continues to do well.

I'm curious about why you'd be disappointed. Is it because you think typst is an irremediably inferior technology to you or is it because you are invested in LaTex?

I do not mean to ask this in accusatory way. I'm not very well informed about typst or tex (I've only used typst once and I thought it was easy and nice).

I'm just curious about what is worse about typst that would make someone disappointed if that was the reason why you would be.

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

#34

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

basro wrote: post #33
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry, but I've never seen overloading of such fundamental characters like the comment character or escape character anywhere. I believe that Racket [0], Mathematica [1], Raku [2], and Rust [3] let you assign arbitrary meanings to most symbols, but these are indeed much more restricted than TeX is (and for good reason). But the issue is really more that TeX barely supports lexical scoping, and that it lets you…

> I would be personally a little disappointed if Typst replaced LaTeX, but until that happens, I definitely hope that it continues to do well. I'm curious about why you'd be disappointed. Is it because you think typst is an irremediably inferior technology to you or is it because you are invested in LaTex? I do not mean to ask this in accusatory way. I'm not very well informed about typst or tex (I've only used typst…

It's mostly that I'm quite personally invested in TeX, far more than most people are. I work on it nearly every day, and I'm even hosting an international TeX conference about a month from now [0].

I do have a few minor concerns about Typst, mainly that its parsing/compiling strategy allows less introspection and extensibility than TeX does (but this is necessary for its fast compile times), and the fact that it's backed by a for-profit company seems less robust than TeX's 50-year history of volunteer maintainership. And of course Typst is still missing quite a few features, but if it's successful I can't imagine that this will be an issue.

Also, I personally mostly use ConTeXt [1], which compiles much faster than LaTeX and has a very uniform syntax, so switching to Typst wouldn't have as many benefits compared to if I were switching from LaTeX.

So if Typst were to take over, I'd mainly be disappointed that my very deep knowledge of TeX would be no longer relevant. But I also wouldn't be surprised if Typst ultimately revitalized TeX, since it might motivate us to improve TeX even more, and Typst might be a good entrypoint for users interested in plain text typesetting (who might then switch to TeX if they find Typst too limiting).

[0]: https://tug.org/tug2026/

[1]: ConTeXt uses the same underlying TeX engine as LaTeX, but different macros. See https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb46-3/tb144berry-engines-formats.pd... for a brief overview.

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

#35

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

kxhbr wrote: post #6

Co-maintainer here. Tectonic is a cool project, but hasn't seen any significant changes in a few years---and likely won't anytime soon. It seems we maintainers don't have the time and motivation to put serious work into Tectonic. I haven't looked at the code in years (and thus may be wrong), but here's a quick overview: Tectonic's code consists of thin bindings to /harfbuzz/graphite/etc and a vendored XeTeX (in C, wi…

I haven't used typesetting since my university days and updating my ModernCV CV, but it's also worth mentioning SILE (https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile) for modern typesetting with minimal cruft.

I also found the very useful comparison website https://polytype.dev/ on the subject!

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

#36

Post by leephillips »

GiovanniP wrote: post #20
kxhbr wrote: post #6

Co-maintainer here. Tectonic is a cool project, but hasn't seen any significant changes in a few years---and likely won't anytime soon. It seems we maintainers don't have the time and motivation to put serious work into Tectonic. I haven't looked at the code in years (and thus may be wrong), but here's a quick overview: Tectonic's code consists of thin bindings to /harfbuzz/graphite/etc and a vendored XeTeX (in C, wi…

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…

I disagree. Many people abhor WYSIWYG programs, myself included.

Having tried both TeXmacs and Typst¹, it’s easy for me to understand why Typst is rapidly gaining adoption and why, after — how long, over a decade? — essentially nobody uses TeXmacs.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/

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

#37

Post by IshKebab »

leephillips wrote: post #36
GiovanniP wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree. Many people abhor WYSIWYG programs, myself included. Having tried both TeXmacs and Typst¹, it’s easy for me to understand why Typst is rapidly gaining adoption and why, after — how long, over a decade? — essentially nobody uses TeXmacs. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/

I haven't tried TeXmacs (thanks to the truly abysmal name I assumed it was something to do with Emacs), but I have used LyX and it changed my opinion on WYSIWYG. It isn't a fundamentally flawed idea, it's just that most implementations of it are.

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

#38

Post by leephillips »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #34
basro wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be personally a little disappointed if Typst replaced LaTeX, but until that happens, I definitely hope that it continues to do well. I'm curious about why you'd be disappointed. Is it because you think typst is an irremediably inferior technology to you or is it because you are invested in LaTex? I do not mean to ask this in accusatory way. I'm not very well informed about typst or tex (I've only used typst…

It's mostly that I'm quite personally invested in TeX, far more than most people are. I work on it nearly every day, and I'm even hosting an international TeX conference about a month from now [0]. I do have a few minor concerns about Typst, mainly that its parsing/compiling strategy allows less introspection and extensibility than TeX does (but this is necessary for its fast compile times), and the fact that it's ba…

Excuse me for going meta, but your series of comments here have been extraordinarily informative, wise, and a pleasure to read. Thank you for taking the time (and for your work on TeX).

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

#39

Post by DarkUranium »

IshKebab wrote: post #37
leephillips wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Many people abhor WYSIWYG programs, myself included. Having tried both TeXmacs and Typst¹, it’s easy for me to understand why Typst is rapidly gaining adoption and why, after — how long, over a decade? — essentially nobody uses TeXmacs. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/

I haven't tried TeXmacs (thanks to the truly abysmal name I assumed it was something to do with Emacs), but I have used LyX and it changed my opinion on WYSIWYG. It isn't a fundamentally flawed idea, it's just that most implementations of it are.

LyX is specifically advertised not as WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM ('M' = "Mean"). Note how the exported/final document looks very little like the in-UI one.

Typora & Obsidian apply the same ideas to Markdown.

I do think WYSIWYG is an absolutely broken paradigm for anything outside of literally just desktop publishing --- but WYSIWYM has a lot of merit.

Enough that I've been working on a stand-alone Markdown editor component that takes ideas from Typora et al.

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

#40

Post by IshKebab »

DarkUranium wrote: post #39
IshKebab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried TeXmacs (thanks to the truly abysmal name I assumed it was something to do with Emacs), but I have used LyX and it changed my opinion on WYSIWYG. It isn't a fundamentally flawed idea, it's just that most implementations of it are.

LyX is specifically advertised not as WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM ('M' = "Mean"). Note how the exported/final document looks very little like the in-UI one. Typora & Obsidian apply the same ideas to Markdown. I do think WYSIWYG is an absolutely broken paradigm for anything outside of literally just desktop publishing --- but WYSIWYM has a lot of merit. Enough that I've been working on a stand-alone Markdown editor component…

Sure but that's just because they're making a point about how it isn't as shit as WYSIWYG implies. Really, it is WYSIWYG (even if the output doesn't exactly match the editing experience). It's just good WYSIWYG.

Ooo I thought of another example of good WYSIWYG - Qt Creator's form editor. The only good GUI form editor I've used. Again the editing experience doesn't exactly match the output (e.g. some layout features are visible), but it's clearly WYSIWYG. It just doesn't suck like MS Word.

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