Reference: external actions and CI tooling worth studying for our own design

Standing reading list of external Actions and CI tooling worth studying as we design our own action surface — not a work item. Add finds as comments.

xu-cheng/latex-action

https://github.com/xu-cheng/latex-action — "GitHub Action to compile LaTeX documents", ~1.4k stars, actively maintained. Compiles LaTeX in a pinned TeX Live container: the closest analogue to build-lectures with builder: pdflatex. Proposed for QuantEcon in 2020 in QuantEcon/meta#16, closed in favour of build-lectures; its input design is the interesting part.

• texlive_version / docker_image as first-class inputs — the one genuinely open contrast. setup-environment exposes no image or tag input; container-mode is an auto-detected output (setup-environment/action.yml:36) and the image comes from the consumer's container: block (templates/ci.yml:31-32), so toolchain pinning is invisible at our surface. Bears on how containers/ and the Anaconda baseline are surfaced (#106).
• pre_compile / post_compile hooks — an escape hatch instead of a new input per scenario. build-lectures/action.yml:22 has extra-args; build-jupyter-cache has no equivalent, so callers routed through the cache action cannot reach it — the passthrough half of #97.
• continue_on_error — a named decision on whether a failed build fails the job. Ours: build-lectures/action.yml:25 defaults extra-args to -W --keep-going, and build-lectures/action.yml:102-104 adds -n only for pdflatex and jupyter, never html. The upstream instance, QuantEcon/meta#340, closed as completed 2026-07-30; ours is the strictness half of #97.
• extra_system_packages / extra_fonts — layering extra dependencies at run time without rebuilding or forking the base image.

Theirs is stateless — document and toolchain; ours also carry environment setup, caching and publishing, so their input surface is a yardstick for which of our inputs are essential and which are accidental.

The "Potential New Actions" section of docs/FUTURE-DEVELOPMENT.md:38-45 already evaluates lycheeverse/lychee-action in the same register, so folding in costs no new page and no tension with the docs-surplus trim at PLAN.md:80.

• Decide the home: fold into "Potential New Actions" in docs/FUTURE-DEVELOPMENT.md and close, or keep this open as the standing thread.

Start with the issue's referenced sections in docs/FUTURE-DEVELOPMENT.md and PLAN.md, then review the existing external-action notes and linked action files. Decide whether this material belongs in the existing "Potential New Actions" section or should remain as a standing thread; done means the documentation is folded in and the issue is closed, or the thread is intentionally retained.