TeX Live & Tectonic

If you’re anything like me, then you hate TeX Live and its 3GB$^+$ distribution files and tlmgr and so. You might have heard of Tectonic. It’s a LaTeX distribution based on XeTeX and TeX Live that downloads distribution files on-demand and, among other things, ditches tlmgr. As such, it is much more manageable and pleasurable to use.

There’s one downside, though: for a TeX Live distribution to be usable in Tectonic, it has to be bundled in a bespoke file format and served so that it can be downloaded by clients using HTTP range requests. Unfortunately, although the Tectonic Typesetting team has created the build files for the latest TeX Live distribution release as of the moment I am writing this (which is 20240312), they haven’t generated the corresponding bundle. So, if you try to install tectonic and use it, you will notice the latest version of TeX Live available on their servers is 2023.

I eventually found myself in need of the most recent version, but I didn’t want to have to install the full TeX Live distribution (tectonic really is very convenient, after all) so I ended up building the 20240312 bundle myself, and, in fact, I am hosting it here.

Notes

• If you want to use the 20240312 bundle, you will have to build tectonic from source or use one of the binaries found in the CI pipeline artifacts, since the bundle format has been updated and the latest release of Tectonic available on GitHub does not support it, as it’s too old.

• If you want to build it yourself, you should be able to just follow the instructions outlined on the README, for the most part. One detail that doesn’t seem to be mentioned, however, is that for actually hosting a bundle that can be used by tectonic, you will need the .ttb and the index.gz files (only). If the .ttb file is named <name>.ttb, then index.gz has to be renamed to <name>.ttb.index.gz, and they must be placed in the same directory.

  The index.gz file is actually contained in the .ttb file, and you will have to “extract” it using the dd command that is also mentioned in the README. That means you will have to look out in the output of tectonic -X bundle create for the offset and size of the index.gz file.

Usage

Simply invoke tectonic as:

tectonic -b https://goll.cc/texlive2024/bundle.ttb ...