Motivation for (_preamble,index,_postamble).tex

Help & Advice
#1

I am new to latex and brand new to tectonic.

What is the motivation for splitting a document into preamble.tex, index.tex, postamble.tex?

#2

Not sure where you got that very specific split up from, but if you are asking why to split up files at all, that is no different from any other programming language: maintainability.

#3

@PHPirates The split comes from the v2 cli, where tectonic -X new creates Tectonic.toml, and src/{_preamble,index,_postamble}.tex these get squashed together by the engine.

These are just the default though, you can change them in Tectonic.toml documented here
https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/book/latest/ref/tectonic-toml.html

#4

Oh, I see, so that’s like a .latexmkrc file I guess, thanks I hadn’t seen it yet. Need to check if we need to implement support for that in our plugin, because it seems to partially duplicate our run configurations.

#5

I understand the motivation for splitting filed.
I don’t understand the default which makes a set of files that can only be compiled by tectonic due to the implicit concatenation of the three files.

#6

Me neither, my opinion is that LaTeX files should be editor-independent. @pkgw

#7

@PHPirates I think tectonic is leading me down a path of ruin. Why note just create the three files but have index,tex import the other two?

#8

I’ll probably hurt someone’s feelings but I think the current ‘tectonic -X’ is behavior is bad and will hurt the project over the long run.

tectonic -X new harmful · Issue #846 · tectonic-typesetting/tectonic (github.com)