Crate tectonic

Tectonic is a complete TeX/LaTeX engine converted into a standalone library. It is derived from the XeTeX variant of TeX and uses the support files packages by the TeX Live project. Tectonic would not be possible without the hard work that has gone into these projects.

Because Tectonic is based on the XeTeX engine, it can take advantage of the features of modern fonts (TrueType, OpenType, etc.), outputs directly to the PDF file format, and supports Unicode inputs. Most importantly, the TeX experience delivered by Tectonic is completely embeddable: if you link with this crate you can fully process TeX documents, from source to PDF, without relying on any externally installed software, configuration, or resource files. This is possible because Tectonic bundles the traditional TeX tools and routes their I/O through a pluggable backend system.

This crate delivers command-line frontend, tectonic, that has a modernized user experience that hides TeX’s copious output (by default) and never asks for user input. Virtually all of the functionality of the frontend is accessible programmatically through the driver module of this crate.

This crate joins a set of sub-crates that combine to provide the Tectonic user experience. Those crates generally have APIs that are more carefully structured and better documented than this crate, which grew somewhat organically. The foundational crates are:

• tectonic_errors for core error handing types.
• tectonic_status_base for a basic user-facing status-reporting framework.
• tectonic_io_base for the I/O abstraction framework.
• tectonic_bridge_core for a framework to launch unsafe (C/C++) “engines” through FFI.

Building on these and other support crates of less general interest are the following major pieces of Tectonic’s functionality:

• tectonic_bundles for the“bundles” of TeX support files underlying Tectonic processing.
• tectonic_docmodel for the Tectonic “document model” expressed in Tectonic.toml files.
• tectonic_engine_xetex for the XeTeX engine.
• tectonic_engine_xdvipdfmx for the xdvipdfmx engine.
• tectonic_engine_bibtex for the BibTeX engine.

The main module of this crate provides an all-in-wonder function for compiling LaTeX code to a PDF:

use tectonic;

let latex = r#"
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, world!
\end{document}
"#;

let pdf_data: Vec<u8> = tectonic::latex_to_pdf(latex).expect("processing failed");
println!("Output PDF size is {} bytes", pdf_data.len());

The driver module provides a high-level interface for driving the engines in more realistic circumstances.

Re-exports

pub use crate::engines::bibtex::BibtexEngine;

pub use crate::engines::spx2html::Spx2HtmlEngine;

pub use crate::errors::Error;

pub use crate::errors::ErrorKind;

pub use crate::errors::Result;

Modules

config

User configuration settings for the Tectonic engine.

digest

Compatibility re-exports of tectonic_io_base::digest types.

docmodel

Connecting the Tectonic document model to the engines.

driver

The high-level Tectonic document processing interface.

engines

Access to Tectonic’s processing backends.

errors

Tectonic error types and support code.

io

Extensions to Tectonic’s pluggable I/O backend.

status

Compatibility reexports of tectonic_status_base types

unstable_opts

Unstable options for the Tectonic engine.

Macros

ctry

“Chained try” — like try!, but with the ability to add context to the error message.

errmsg

Use string formatting to create an Error of kind errors::ErrorKind::Msg.

tt_error

Report a formatted error message to the user.

tt_error_styled

Show formatted text to the user, styled as an error message.

tt_note

Report a formatted informational message to the user.

tt_warning

Report a formatted warning message to the user.

Structs

TexEngine

A struct for invoking the (Xe)TeX engine.

XdvipdfmxEngine

A struct for invoking the xdvipdfmx engine.

Enums

TexOutcome

A possible outcome from a (Xe)TeX engine invocation.

Constants

FORMAT_SERIAL

A serial number describing the detailed binary layout of the TeX “format files” used by this crate. This number will occasionally increment, indicating that the format file structure has changed. There is no provision for partial forwards or backwards compatibility: if the number changes, you need to regenerate your format files. If you’re generating format files, you should munge this serial number in the filename, or something along those lines, to make sure that when the engine is updated you don’t attempt to reuse old files.

Functions

latex_to_pdf

Compile LaTeX text to a PDF.