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On a tangential note, I wish there were a single-executable "distribution" of Plain TeX that would simply "do one thing well" - convert a TeX source to more or less nicely typeset PDF.

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Have you tried LuaTeX? If you use plain TeX (without requiring extra LaTeX files), you should only need the binary.

LuaTeX is the successor of pdfTeX. Much improved. And it can use your local .ttf/.otf/... font files out of the box.

The install is very minimalistic and should not require more than downloading a binary and maybe a config file.

http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/bin/luatex/linux-6...

I've found more than several tools that all basically complete this task. latexmk -pdf Foo.tex, being the most common one that I can remember.

It is somewhat annoying that it will create so many temp files. I guess. I've gotten over it pretty heavily. (I actually regret not looking at the log file more often. I feel I should know how to read most of that.)

LaTeXTools in Sublime et al. will erase the temp files with a shortcut, plus you can add more extensions to clean in case you use packages that add more temp files.

I think there is almost a rite of passage for people getting into latex to create their own build tools. :)

Try `latexmk -c` to remove all the temp files.

I can add the help of latexmk to thingsi should read more. :)

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