What I really like about tectonic, is that a program can use it like a library, and embed the engine without shelling out to execute programs. There is at this

What I really like about tectonic, is that a program can use it like a library, and embed the engine without shelling out to execute programs. There is at this point some system font dependencies that need to be realized before compilation. But otherwise it pretty much just works without a lot of pre-installation steps.