The Tectonopedia

The Tectonic reference encyclopedia. The Tectonopedia is a web application whose content is primarily technical documentation that is written using the TeX typesetting language.

Quick Start

To set up and launch the app and concurrent build server:

yarn install
cargo run --release -- serve --open

The key directories for editing the encyclopedia are:

• cls: shared TeX support files
• idx: encyclopedia index definitions
• src: source for the Rust program
• txt: encyclopedia TeX content
• web: web application frontend code

To add a new article, create a new file somewhere in the txt tree.

You can open this repository in a GitHub Codespace, edit files in these directories, and immediately see changes in a running version of the website. (Although, right now it takes a fairly long time to initialize each Codespace container, since there is a lot of fetching and compiling to do.)

End-to-End Workflow

The Tectonopedia is created in three main stages:

1. Rust code in src is compiled into the tectonopedia program.
2. The tectonopedia program compiles TeX source in txt into raw HTML (+CSS, etc.) outputs in build.
3. Parcel.js combines those HTML outputs with frontend code in web to create full web app: either a set of production-ready files, or a hot-reloading development web server.

The command tectonopedia serve, runnable locally as cargo run --release -- serve, will both watch the TeX inputs and manage a Parcel.js development server, automatically rerunning all processing steps except for any recompilations of the tectonopedia program itself.

Some key support directories in this end-to-end process are:

• build: raw HTML+ outputs from the TeX compilation step
• cache: cached intermediate files for the TeX compilation step
• dist: compiled HTML+ outputs from the Parcel bundling step
• node_modules: NPM support modules for the Yarn/Parcel build steps
• serve-ui: the web UI for the build server
• serve: a clone of build watched by the yarn serve process
• target: compiled executable outputs from the Rust compilation step

To create a production version of the encylopedia, run: cargo run --release -- build. (In a devcontainer/Codespace, add the flag --features=external-harfbuzz to save rebuild time.)

Legalities

The source code underlying the Tectonopedia is licensed under the MIT License (see the file LICENSE-MIT).