dockerfiles VS docker-texlive-thin

It's really not that arcane — the image definition just consists of commands that run in the context of the image. For example, here's one that adds X support to an Ubuntu image: https://github.com/andrewmackrodt/dockerfiles/blob/master/ubuntu-x11/Dockerfile

I recently wrote a few documents in latex after ignoring it for over a decade. Trying to get a working setup with latex + bibtex + a few custom styles was quite annoying. I can appreciate that people who just want to author a document with some equations in latex but who are not programmers or avid command line users might find the entire experience of getting a tolerable latex workflow set up very challenging. I guess that might be partly why https://www.overleaf.com/ has a business model! Hide all the package management and command line tooling nonsense behind a simple web interface.

I was very excited to find Thomas Weise had wrangled latex and a Tex Live installation into a docker container: https://github.com/thomasWeise/docker-texlive-thin

Another useful tool is latexmk, which is already installed inside the docker-texlive-thin container : https://mg.readthedocs.io/latexmk.html

By containing the madness of latex tooling and package management with docker and some volume mounts, I could have a reasonably sane build process to manufacture PDFs from latex source files.

I don't recommend md2blog add mandatory dependencies on anything related to latex. Another way to think about it might be offering optional latex support through some plugin mechanism that doesn't know anything about latex. But that path sure won't produce anything resembling a "zero config" static site generator.