Tectonic Documentation

Tectonic is a modernized, self-contained typesetting system designed to empower users to create high-quality technical documents (such as scientific papers, software manuals, and analytical reports).

At its core, Tectonic uses a complete engine powered by XeTeX and TeXLive, providing unparalleled mathematical typesetting, rich content support (figures, tables, code), and deep cross-referencing capabilities. Unlike traditional TeX distributions that rely on a complex tree of thousands of local support files, Tectonic is designed to be self-contained and reproducible.

The tectonic_dep_support crate provides build-time utilities for locating external library dependencies. It is designed to facilitate the Tectonic build process by supporting two primary backends for dependency discovery:

• pkg-config: Used for finding libraries on Unix-like systems.
• vcpkg: Used for finding libraries on Windows or via the vcpkg package manager.

This crate abstracts the complexities of dependency detection to enable a consistent build environment for Tectonic.

Tectonic aims to improve upon the classic TeX ecosystem through four primary focus areas:

• User Experience (UX): Improving error messages and diagnostic output to be more intuitive for modern users, even if it requires breaking compatibility with classic TeX.
• Embeddability: Providing the engine as a reusable software library that is easy to embed within other software systems, moving away from the traditional suite of interacting command-line programs.
• Reproducibility: Enabling easy, byte-for-byte reproducible document builds.
• Web Output: Optimizing the core engine to produce high-quality technical documents for modern Web browsers and displays.