First, Exploring Nix Flakes: Build Documents Reproducibly is an invaluable resource and a must read to get up to speed quickly with:

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It doesn't hurt to have the User's Guide and Reference Manual by Lamport on your desk if you're into dead print/trees. I've got the Second Edition which appears to be from 1994 when I was seven years old. Still, it's useful.

Next, at wikibooks makes things a bit easier if you're one who likes to sit at the computer and type away. Reading books is old hat, sorry Lamport.

I've had that manual sitting around for awhile and had even dogeared some pages but I set it aside a bit ago because I had no real need. Now with the world going mad and jobs being lost all around us I've wanted to update my resume. My old CV was written using groff and it just wasn't up to snuff (the CV or groff). Handling fonts in groff seemed to be a real pain and it's no cake walk with but it's far easier. has a thriving community whereas groff's is smaller and withering. Don't get me wrong I like groff but is the way to go in the waning days of 2023 (revised in 2026 and mood is same...). No ands ifs or buts about it. And seeing as it's soon to be a new year new things are afoot. I'll paste my flake.nix here (it's pretty much the one you'd find on flyx.org):

{
  description = "Get Started with LaTeX";
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable;
    flake-utils.url = github:numtide/flake-utils;
  };
  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, flake-utils }:
    with flake-utils.lib; eachSystem allSystems
      (system:
        let
          pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
          # re: latexmk see: https://latex.us/support/latexmk/INSTALL
          tex = pkgs.texlive.combine {
            inherit (pkgs.texlive) scheme-full latex-bin latexmk lwarp;
          };
        in
        rec {
          packages = {
            document = pkgs.stdenvNoCC.mkDerivation rec {
              name = "latex-document";
              src = self;
              buildInputs = [ pkgs.coreutils pkgs.poppler-utils tex ];
              phases = [ "unpackPhase" "buildPhase" "installPhase" ];
              buildPhase = ''
                export PATH="${pkgs.lib.makeBinPath buildInputs}";
                mkdir -p .cache/texmf-var
                env TEXMFHOME=.cache TEXMFVAR=.cache/texmf-var \
                  SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=$(date +%s) \
                  OSFONTDIR=${pkgs.commit-mono}/share/fonts \
                  latexmk -interaction=nonstopmode -pdf -lualatex \
                  lamport.tex;
              '';
              installPhase = ''
                mkdir -p $out
                cp lamport.pdf $out
              '';
            };
          };
          packages.default = packages.document;
          devShell = with pkgs; mkShell { packages = [ packages.document.buildInputs ]; shellHook = ''SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=$(date +%s); printf "\t%s\n\t%s\n", "Hello LaTeX", "run latexmk -interaction=nonstopmode -pdf -pvc -lualatex <your_tex_doc.tex>"''; };
        });
}

Running nix build will produce a dir called result with your document in it (lamport.pdf in this case). Or you are free to run nix develop and have (hoepfully) everything you'd need to run the commands manually. -pvc flag means generate a continuous preview which latexmk will try to open with acroread which has been removed from nixpkgs for security reasons. You can probably hack latexmk to open another program instead but maybe another time? Soon we'll explore creating HTML from these tex docs and still use nix so everything is sorta contained. Notice lwarp in the flake above; it is the program we will use to create an HTML file from our tex doc.