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Comment by mraison | Hacker News Reader

If you just want to compile a TeX document without drowning your hard drive, I heavily recommend Tectonic (https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/), which behaves more like a typical development tool.

On macOS:

    brew install tectonic
    tectonic mypaper.tex

This will automatically download the exact set of packages needed to compile the paper, and cleanup any intermediary files generated during compilation. And it's trivial to upgrade and uninstall.

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Note though that this Tectonic is based on a fork of the tangled XeTeX sources (i.e. not the actual WEB source code but the machine-generated C translation) as of some past date. This is a very weird choice probably due to the author (understandably) not being able to make sense of the mess of TeX sources to figure out what's the actual source code. As a consequence, already it has begun to diverge; for instance it does not contain the \expanded primitive that was added to XeTeX last year. Overall, Tectonic seems to have many good ideas, but suffers from being not too familiar with TeX itself and the TeX ecosystem.

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

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