written 05 March 2024

Typst and Latex are pretty cool. This is about to get pretty technical, because I'm probably also going to use this to backup knowledge of how to repoduce my typsetting setup.

I've been typesetting a lot lately for school and for fun. Latex is nice because it's been around for so long, so it's math typesetting, typesetting in general abilities are really guaranteed everywhere. If something doesn't work, you can hack it to work.

The Tectonic typesetting project is also really cool. It made getting a latex compiler on a new machine so fast, no need to download a whole TexLive 5gb package or whatever. I guess things like TinyTex exist but ehhh, I learned LaTex on texlive so I'm a bit averse to learning a different style of package management now. (TexLive's package management being: no need to, you've already installed the entire damn thing :p.) To get tectonic to play nice with Latex Workshop for VS Code, all you need is

    // for using vscode/latex workshop/tectonic together 
    // this is the v1 code version https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions/896#discussioncomment-2850685
    "latex-workshop.latex.recipe.default": "tectonic",
    "latex-workshop.latex.recipes": [
      {
        "name": "tectonic",
        "tools": ["tectonic"]
      }
    ],
    "latex-workshop.latex.tools": [
      {
        "name": "tectonic",
        "command": "tectonic",
        "args": ["%DOC%.tex", "--keep-intermediates"],
        "env": {}
      }
    ],
    

in a settings.json. If tectonic ever finishes upgrading to v2, there's an updated solution in that same github link. But like this, I can preserve pdflatex/tectonic compile outputs. (ie, not need to have the default directory tree for tectonic v2).

Though, I had to learn package managing anyways, in a way. I've kinda fallen in love with EB Garamond, and you can apparently get that font through LaTex.

    ~$ wget https://tug.org/fonts/getnonfreefonts/install-getnonfreefonts
    ~$ texlua install-getnonfreefonts
    ~$ getnonfreefonts garamond
    

I had some weird errors about texlua not having permissions to edit the /etc/... dir, and sudo texlua not being able to find texlua at all, but sudo su was a quick workaround that let everything run correctly.

After that, any .tex document with

    \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
    \usepackage[urw-garamond]{mathdesign}
    \let\circledS\undefined
    

included is able to render the document in garamond. Undefining circledS has to be done because it urw-garamond sets it, which conflicts with amssymb. Amssym's looks much better. Unfortunately, it seems like tectonic won't be able to support this any time soon as per https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/478. "OK, I've identified what's going on here. The TeXLive 2020 update won't help, unfortunately. In the standard TeXLive stack, the PDF generation process automatically generates a "PK" font file from the requested BBM font, by launching an external program mktexpk. Tectonic isn't in a position to do that, leading to the missing-font problem."

I don't quite like how the numbers are rendered, though. The 0 character especially looks quite off, very wide. Not like EB Garamond that comes with google docs. Garamond-Math created at https://github.com/YuanshengZhao/Garamond-Math/ and https://mirrors.mit.edu/CTAN/fonts/garamond-math/Garamond-Math.pdf is absolutely beautiful, though. Check out those sample fonts! Mwah.

Note to self: i should probably make a blog post doubling as an archive for my dotfile/home folder structure and all.

Been on a Bastille kick. Laughter Lines and Icarus are good songs.