rtex is a reimplementation of TeX82. It covers nearly all features of TeX82 (see limitations) and should in principal produce identical output files.
This is a personal project with the purpose of testing how well TeX can be implemented in Rust as well as a learning opportunity for both of these languages. While I am not currently looking for contributions to this project, I am happy for any feedback and suggestions.
- As this project only implements TeX82, it lacks a number of features expected of modern TeX engines, e.g. pdfTeX or LuaTeX, and is not a drop-in replacement for those. Importantly, it lacks integration with Kpathsea and only looks for files in a few hard-coded directories.
- It uses some Unix-specific functions and has only been tested on Linux.
- Time and date facilities are not implemented and the timestamp is fixed to noon, July 4, 1776.
- The option to edit the current input file during interactive error recovery (option 'E') has been removed.
If you would like to try it out, you need to have a Unix system with a recent
version of Rust (1.74 or later) installed. To run it, clone this git repository
locally, change the working directory to rtex/ and run
cargo run
Note though that there is no format preloaded and no fonts are preinstalled. To
make a font available, put the corresponding TFM file into rtex/fonts.
To create a format file from e.g. plain.tex, put the necessary TFM files into
rtex/fonts and a copy of plain.tex and hyphen.tex into rtex/. You are
likely to find copies of these files in your local TeX installation or online.
If you then run
cargo run 'plain.tex \\dump'
the format file plain.fmt should be created. You can start with the format
preloaded by running
cargo run '&plain'
to run interactively or
cargo run '&plain file.tex'
with an input file file.tex.