[tex-live] Outstanding question about Hebrew and Greek hyphenation patterns

Philip Taylor P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk
Sat Sep 21 22:35:30 CEST 2013



Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> I have a 6 Mbit/s connection but installing from a local mirror is
> significantly faster.  Whenever it's necessary to install TL more than
> once a local mirror saves a lot of time.  Please note that
> installation speed is not proportional the network speed because the
> packages have to be de-compressed too.
> 
> Mirroring can done by wget or rsync.  The latter is more efficient.
> I'm mirroring to Apache's htdocs directory.  The advantage is that I
> can install from there on other computers too.  It's also possible to
> mirror to an arbitrary directory.  The TeX Live installer then thinks
> that the stuff is on a CD/DVD.
> 
> I strongly recommend to set up a local mirror.  It doesn't matter how
> fast your internet connection is since files are mirrored while you
> are sleeping if the system is set up properly.  After all, with a
> local mirror the download speed doesn't matter at all and installing
> TeX Live (scheme-full) takes much less than an hour.

OK, well I am trying that as I speak, but I think I clearly need
a far more selectiveincantation than the one from Tug.Org/TeXLive :

E:\CTAN>c:rsync -a -v --progress --delete
rsync://rsync.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/systems/texlive/tlnet/ .

This is pulling in hundreds, if not thousands, of files for
architectures in which I have negative interest.  Is it possible
to make that incantation pull in only generic files and those
targetted specifically at Windows (32-bit or 64-bit) ?

> If you don't want to install everything, select "scheme full" and then
> disable the collections you don't need.  I'm sure that you can avoid
> most of the LaTeX, ConTeXt, and language specific packages this way.
> Your settings are stored in tlpkg/texlive.profile.  You can copy this
> file to other machines if desired.

I will try this once the local mirror exists.
> 
>  > I thought (in my naïvety) that there would be a standard and well-
>  > known combination of Collections/packages/schemes to accomplish
>  > what seemed to me to be a very simple and straightforward aim.
> 
> The problem is that different people have different requirements.  At
> a first glance it sounds reasonable to have an installation scheme
> "Plain TeX" but those who are using XeTeX or LuaTeX probably prefer to
> rely solely on system fonts while others need all the fonts provided
> by TeX Live.  Hence it's not possible to create a scheme for Plain TeX
> users which satisfies the needs or expectations of all of them.

Well, is that true ?  As a 99% XeTeX user, I have no problem with
acquiring 76 Computer Modern fonts plus Latin Modern and whatever
other Metafont-based fonts are in TeX Live.  They, in comparison
to the unbelievably large number of LaTeX packages, will take little
time and take up little space.
> 
> As far as packages are concerned, I strongly recommend to install
> collections even if they contain many packages you don't need.
> Installing single packages is a pain.  If TeX can't find a particular
> file you can ask tlmgr to which package it belongs and install this
> package.  But if this happens thrice you'll recognize that it was a
> mistake not to install the whole collection.  So be careful when
> de-selecting collections in the installer menu.

Fine, thank you, your advice shall be heeded.
** Phil.


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