{The Tectonic Project: Envisioning a 21st-century \TeX\ experience}
{Peter Williams}
{Tectonic is a software project built around an alternative \TeX\ engine
forked from \XeTeX. It was created to explore the answers to two questions.
The first question relates to documents: in a world of 21st-century
technologies\Dash where interactive displays, computation, and internet
connectivity are generally cheap and ubiquitous\Dash what new forms of
technical document have become possible? The second question relates to
tools: how can we use those same technologies to do a better job of
empowering people to create excellent technical documents? The answers are,
of course, intertwined: without a system of great tools, it's hard (or
perhaps impossible?)\ to create great documents.

The premises of the Tectonic project are that the world needs and
deserves a ``21st-century'' document authoring system, that such a
system should have \TeX\ at its heart\Dash and that in order to create a
successful system, parts of the classic \TeX\ experience will need to be
rethought or jettisoned completely.

This is why Tectonic forks \XeTeX\ and is branded independently: while
it aspires to maintain compatibility with classic \TeX\ workflows as far
as can be managed, in a certain sense the whole point of the effort is
to break compatibility and ignore tradition\Dash to experiment with new
ideas that can't be tried in mainline \TeX. Thus far, these ``new
ideas'' have focused on experience design, seeking to deliver a system
that is convenient, empowering, and even delightful for users and
developers. Tectonic is therefore compiled using standard Rust tools,
installs as a single executable file, and downloads support files from a
prebuilt \TeX\ Live distribution on demand.

In the past year, long-threatened work on native \HTML\ output has
finally started landing, including a possibly novel Unicode math
rendering scheme based on font subsetting. The goal for upcoming work is
to flesh out this \HTML\ support so that Tectonic can create the world's
best web-native technical documents, and to use that support to document
the Tectonic system itself.}