Documents
This concept only applies to Tectonic’s V2 interface. It is not relevant to the original (“V1”) interface.
The fundamental unit of processing in Tectonic is the document. The main purpose of Tectonic is to compile documents from their TeX source to one or more output formats.
Source structure
Every Tectonic document is defined by a Tectonic.toml file, which is found at the root of its source tree. This directory is also the root of the current Tectonic workspace. At the moment, “workspaces” and “documents” are the same thing, but in the future it might become possible to define multiple documents inside a single workspace.
The TeX sources are stored in a src subdirectory of the document root. This
directory should contain at least three files: index.tex, _preamble.tex,
and _postamble.tex. These filenames can be changed in the
Tectonic.toml configuration file. The build
command will process these files in the following order:
src/_preamble.texsrc/index.texsrc/_postamble.tex
The intention of this framework is to allow you to isolate the main content of
your document from the usual LaTeX boilerplate. There are no restrictions on
what kind of content may be placed in each file, though. The preamble and
postamble can be empty if you’d like. The new command will stub out
these files for you.
Build structure
Build outputs are placed in the document’s build directory. By default, this is
a build subdirectory of the document root.