Possible to add an offline mode?

Development
#1

I wonder if it’s possible to add a full offline mode, so no Internet connection is required when using.

I don’t care much about the initial download size.

EDIT: it seems it can work with a prebuild “bundle” zip file, where can i get a copy of that?

#2

I think all you need is to point your browser to the link where tectonic is searching for the bundle: https://purl.org/net/pkgwpub/tectonic-default

It seems to be 1.7GB currently.

#3

Thanks but that’s the tar file, i think. I’ve no clue how to convert that back to the zip file, which can be used as offline bundle.

#4

I got this tool: https://www.npmjs.com/package/tar-to-zip

And it works.

#5

That’s great, thanks for the update. So it’s enough to just to extract the tar archive and compress it using zip. This should be probably added to the documentation.

#6

Yes, this is one area that’s not as polished as it should be. It should also be very straightforward to make it possible to load up the .tar and .tar.index.gz files from the local disk, in addition to the Zip format.

For what it’s worth, from my investigations, I do feel that Zip is somewhat better for local-disk access while the tar/index format is better for Web service. Zip format keeps everything in one file, but the indexing information is scattered throughout the file, so it is inefficient to load just the indexing information if you can’t seek quickly. (Which is the case for the Web, since we “seek” by using HTTP Range requests.) Also, having the indexing information be in a separate URL means that we can request that entire item in one shot. I have seen tar formats where the very first or last “file” is a similar record of indexing information, but then you don’t know how big it is a-priori and so you have to make multiple HTTP requests to download it.

Anyway, @crlf0710, you may have seen that @rekka coincidentally (or not?) just submitted a PR that I just merged, #203, which may help provide what you’re looking for.