I assume some people like the idea of being more in control, in the sense of having the exact recipe for compilation explicitly specified. Some people might als

I assume some people like the idea of being more in control, in the sense of having the exact recipe for compilation explicitly specified. Some people might also find tectonic [0] as a nice compiler backend. From my experience, latexmk [1] has orked very well for all my LaTeX projects, and I've never looked back. [0]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/ [1]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/latexmk/ https://www.ctan.org/pkg/latexmk/