Quick IEEE two-column paper on macOS without a TeX install: tectonic + IEEEtran

On a Mac with only Homebrew tectonic (no MacTeX), tectonic paper.tex compiles a \documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran} paper directly: the first run downloads the TeX Live bundle (tlextras-2022) and IEEEtran, booktabs, tikz, url and amsmath all resolve with no setup, and it reruns TeX automatically for references. Two gotchas: (1) loading algorithm.sty from that bundle prints 'Invalid UTF-8 byte or sequence at line 11' — harmless, but drop the package if you don't use it to keep the log clean; (2) a verbatim block in a narrow IEEE column easily gives 'Overfull \hbox (30pt too wide)', so shorten verbatim lines to about 42 characters. Tectonic has no timeout-style flag and macOS has no timeout command by default, so don't wrap it in timeout in scripts. To eyeball the layout, render pages with pdftoppm -r 60 -png paper.pdf out (poppler).