[tex-live] scheme modern

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/1/6 Arno Trautmann <Arno.Trautmann at gmx.de>:
> Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>> 2011/1/6 Arno Trautmann <Arno.Trautmann at gmx.de>:
>>> Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>>> Of course I could keep all packages (and I personally will do so).
>>> But someone new to LaTeX might want to use luaLaTeX (in fact, I tell
>>> every newcomer to do so as to avoid encoding problems etc.) but that
>>> requires him/her to download the full bundle. And that is very large and
>>> takes several hours. So every package not needed could reduce
>>> installation time etc.
>>> Also, I'm not only talking about encoding-related packages, but also
>>> about packages that may be deprecated. Whatever they may be ...
>>>
>>> But if you tell me that most packages are indeed required to use lua/Xe
>>> effectively then you're right. The only thing I know is that I have a
>>> large number of packages I never used. And a beginner doesn't need them
>>> either.
>>> For backward compatibility, there's always the possibility to load
>>> packages when needed.
>>>
>> For such purpose it is better not to remove old engines, but packages
>> and fonts not required by beginners. You could remove TikZ, TeX Gyre
>> fonts and similar stuff. It is possible to make useful tiny
>> distribution that would fit to 50 MB or so.
>
> I don't think so. A beginner should have easy access to beautiful fonts
> as well as graphic generation. Not many people seem to share my oppinion
> on what a beginner needs to have and to know - of course you could
> provide a beginner with a plainTeX and that would be tiny indeed.
>
There was a project a few years ago to develop a tiny distribution for
beginners. It was started by one Czech guy (and probably never
finished although some working version was presented). It was aimed to
Windows users only. It contained pdflatex, text editor with LaTeX
helps and the most basic packages. Its size was 40 MB.

TikZ is very complex package. Beginners will hardly be able to use it.
Users who are able to use TikZ will probably need a lot of other
packages.

I have scheme-full installed. The size of the whole texmf-dist is 2.4
GB while the size of texmf-dist/tex containing the packages is only
172 MB, ie about 7% of total size. If you do not remove the largest
packages as TikZ and fonts, you hardly save any space. If you do not
want to remove TeX Gyre, you can probably remove support for Arabic
and Asian languages, it may save some good space.

Morever, when installing from the net, everything is sent compressed
and TeX sources can be compressed very efficiently. You do not save
much bandwidth by removing TeX and MF source files.

These are the sizes:
 du -sh /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/*
15M     /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/bibtex
284K    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/context
1.2G    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/doc
4.5M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/dvips
863M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts
1.4M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/ls-R
276K    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/makeindex
484K    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/metafont
2.7M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/metapost
36K     /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/mft
2.1M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/omega
256K    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/pbibtex
6.1M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/scripts
183M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/source
172M    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/tex
22M     /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/tex4ht
4.0K    /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/vtex

> cheers
> Arno
>
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz