This release is mainly about the following change:
- The URL embedded in the code that points to the default bundle has been changed to point to the archive.org domain. Hopefully this will result in more reliable service — there have been problems with SSL certificate updates on purl.org in the past and again recently (#253).
Developer-facing improvements:
- The main crate now provides an all-in-one function,
tectonic::latex_to_pdf(), that does what it says, using “sensible” defaults. Run a full TeX processing session, end-to-end, in a single function call! (#252) - In support of the previous change, the behavior of the Rust code was changed to use a static global mutex to serialize invocations of the C/C++ engine implementations, which currently include massive amounts of global state and thus cannot be run in a multithreaded fashion. The recommended approach used to be for users of the library to provide such a mutex themselves. @pkgw was initially reluctant to include such a mutex at the crate level since he feared the possibility of weird surprising behavior … but the real weird surprising behavior is when you try to run the engine in a multithreaded program and it blows up on you!
- Also in support of the previous change, the framework for running the test suite has been revamped and improved. We can now run doctests that invoke the full engine, and the tests of the executable artifacts now activate a special debug mode that prevents accesses of the network and/or the calling user’s personal resource file cache.
- The usual work on tidying the C/C++ code, and also more work towards the planned HTML output mode. Activating the experimental “semantic pagination” mode now alters the engine behavior in two key ways: it disables the linebreaker and custom output routines. This breaks processing of all extant documents, but @pkgw believes that these changes are important steps toward reliable generation of HTML output. (#237, #239, #245, #250)