Internal package support?

[jbreitbart]

Hi

I am wondering if there is a way to use non-public packages. I have a company internal package stored that is provided as a "TDS compliant archive". Is there a way to use that together with tectonic? Sorry, I am really bad with the internals of LaTeX 😞 I tried to copy the files of the archive in the same folder as my tex file, but this gets very messy and I got other error messages as well.

[MTRNord]

I was about to ask the same :)

Basically we are currently porting various old PowerPoint templates to beamer, so I wonder what the best way is to package them and then use them in tectonic. They for obvious reasons wouldn't be on CTAN. So I wonder what the correct way of handling this would be.

[pkgw]

If you're working above a certain scale, I'd suggest creating your own bundle that includes the files. The tectonic-texlive-bundles repo provides a reproducible workflow for doing so, and it shouldn't be hard to customize. The only really hassle there is getting a checkout of the many-gigabyte Git mirror of the TeX Live SVN repo. You'd have to put the resulting several-gigabyte bundle file online somewhere, but that's not asking too much these days.

If you're not able to go that route, the solution isn't as clean as I'd like, since the right approach is basically to integrate a package manager into Tectonic, which is pretty big engineering lift. You can symlink the relevant files into your projects, or just copy them in every time, or use the -Z search-path option for one-off builds ("V1" CLI or tectonic -X compile).

But if anyone wants extra credit for that engineering lift: teach Tectonic to recognize NPM package.json files and/or Conda environment.yml exports and search the associated package trees for additional support files. Integration with the latter would also give us a path for solving the longstanding biblatex/biber integration issues.