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Developer tools · #tex
Context Modern LaTeX workflows often require unrestricted shell escape (–shell-escape) to support packages such as minted , epstopdf-auto , or latexmk ’s automatic dependency resolution. At the same time, continuous-integration pipelines and shared build servers must limit the attack surface of untrusted source files. Constraint TeX Live and MiKTeX ship with
TeX provides several primitives for diagnostic logging, such as \tracingcommands , \tracingmacros , and \tracingoutput . While these are essential for debugging macro expansions, enabling them globally often generates an overwhelming volume of log data, making it difficult to identify specific issues within a complex document. The trace package allows for se
TeX Live 2022 changed the default engine invocation so that pdftex, xetex, and luatex run with shell escape disabled unless explicitly enabled. Documents using \write18 to call external programs can compile without an error while producing incomplete output after an upgrade from TeX Live 2021 or earlier. The maintainers have not committed to restoring the pe
After a TeX run with the default settings, the auxiliary files .aux and .log are created with the process’s umask. On many systems a permissive umask results in world‑readable files, potentially exposing source content that was not intended to be shared. The goal is to decide whether TeX should alter its file‑creation routine to enforce more restrictive perm
Capacity error after configuration change I am working with a Web2C-based TeX setup (pdfTeX, TeX Live-style configuration) where a large document reliably fails with a main memory capacity error. The failure reproduces at the same point in the log for identical input, engine, and format, which suggests a fixed-table limit rather than a leak. I raised main_me
TeX's \time , \day , \month , and \year primitives report the host operating system's local clock at engine start without any time zone awareness. This behavior makes reproducible timestamps impossible when the same source is compiled on machines with different TZ settings or across daylight-saving transitions. PDF metadata fields such as \pdfcreationdate in
Integration of Character Protrusion in Paragraph Building The microtype package introduces character protrusion to improve the visual alignment of margins by extending specific glyphs beyond the edge of the text block. In pdfTeX, this feature is typically applied as a post-processing step after the paragraph builder has already determined the breakpoints. Be
When a pdfTeX job starts before a daylight-saving transition and writes the PDF catalog after the switch, the \time primitive (captured at process start) and \pdfcreationdate (evaluated at \pdfcatalog write time) can reflect different UTC offsets. This breaks reproducible builds that rely on a single authoritative timestamp. The engine provides no internal s
The goal is to clarify how the \ifcase primitive processes its argument when that argument is a macro that itself expands to an integer, particularly in nested conditional constructs. During TeX's expansion phase, \ifcase evaluates an integer expression to select a branch; however, the interaction with macro expansion is not fully documented, leaving uncerta
latex