tectonic

[Paulo Ney de Souza]

First, to anyone who wants to know more about Tectonic, watch the wonderful
opening keynote address by Peter K. G. Williams at TUG-2022. It is
available on TUG YouTube Channel.

The IF itself irks me a bit... but more on that later.

We live in times where the engines are being forked left and right to
create HTML, eBooks, ... and this will probably continue, and it would sure
be nice to have packages working in the same way in as many engines as
possible.

The growth of the terminal output and log files over the last 40 years have
been huge. I have LaTeX files from the early 80's producing (almost) the
same output but with log files that are 3 orders of magnitude larger. The
growth is inevitable, but it looks like everything is being thrown at these
files and they just keep on growing. The growth is so big, that to proper
analyze a log file these days you need a TeX Log Analyzer:

     https://ctan.org/pkg/texloganalyser?lang=en

and users are starting to ignore log files and go looking for other ways to
debug. This is not healthy!

They can easily fork "roboto.sty" , include it in Tectonic and then back
into CTAN. We have very little to gain from this and a lot to lose.

So that begs the question: What is the real use of such a command in the
package? What is the difference between XeTeX and the other many engines
that we have right now? I am not sure I understand either of them.

Paulo Ney



On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 6:35 AM Bob Tennent <rdtennent at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> I'm sending this to inform the TeX community about this system:
>
> https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
>
> which claims to be a "modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX
> engine."   It seems they have forked xelatex to download packages as needed.
>
> I received a complaint from a tectonic user that using the roboto package
> generated many "Requested font" warning messages in the user output. A
> tectonic developer attributed this to the
>
> \ifxetex\XeTeXtracingfonts=1\fi
>
> command in roboto.sty.  Indeed this will generate the messages but these
> normally go to the log file, not terminal output.  I do not intend to
> remove this command from roboto.sty (or any of the other font packages I
> maintain) because of this "feature" of tectonic.
>
> Bob T.
>
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