Tectonic is a modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine, powered by XeTeX and TeXLive.

If you just want to compile TeX documents, you should probably click through to the main Tectonic website. This page is primarily aimed at folks interested in how Tectonic works "under the hood." If you want to build the tectonic Rust crate, check out its README.

• User website
• Community discussion forum
• Installation
• Build instructions
• API documentation
• Issues
• Changelog

If you’re interested in Tectonic as a software tool, you might also want to check out:

• One of the following GitHub Actions
  • setup-tectonic, which lets you use tectonic directly in your workflows (supports caching + optionally biber)
  • compile-latex contributed by Vinay Sharma, which is powered by Tectonic.
• tt.ente.ninja, which runs Tectonic against a subset of the arxiv.org corpus à la the Rust tool Crater — a project by @Mrmaxmeier

Much of the core code of Tectonic is derived from XeTeX, and we strive to track and maintain compatibility with upstream as much as possible. However, the nature of the Tectonic project is such that its source code is going to diverge from that of XeTeX over time. We can do our best to track the semantics of changes to XeTeX, but the expression of those changes in source form may well change greatly over time.

In this repository, the Git submodule reference_sources links to the "staging repository" that tracks the XeTeX source code that we use as a reference. In particular, the version of the reference code in the submodule is the most recent code whose semantics are guaranteed to be expressed in Tectonic, to the best of our efforts. You don’t need to clone reference_sources to build Tectonic (which is good because everyone is always super confused by how Git submodules work!). It just provides a convenient way for Git to track the exact reference code that we are using at any given time.

Please see the tectonic-staging README for more information. (Or at least, more words on the topic.)