TeX Live for self publishers

[Lloyd R. Prentice]

Hello,

As a self publisher with more than 30 years of software development experience and low-on-the-learning-curve LaTeX skills, I can only imagine and applaud the many person-hours of diligent work that has gone into the TeX Live distribution. No doubt the system is bundled and deployed as it is for good reasons.

I’m drawn to LaTex with an interest in quality typesetting and the markdown package. And, my sense is that many other self publishers would benefit by integrating the two technologies into their workflow.

But in my own practice two things are serious barriers to adoption by the hundreds of thousands of self publishers currently wedded to MS Word. Note that since the markdown package is a work-in-progress, I and other self publishers need an up-to-date version of the markdown package, so installing via apt is not in the cards. So, concerns:

1. The official installation procedure and docs feels overly cumbersome and error prone 
2. TeX Live installs gigabytes of packages that have little added value to a book publisher

Tinytex appears to be a serious effort to solve these two concerns. But, as I understand, it’s wedded to R.

So, questions:

 — What skills and effort would it take to create a simple-to-install LaTeX distribution dedicated to book publishing, perhaps based upon tinytex?

— How difficult would it be to develop automation tools that would take the larger TeX Live distribution and generate a much smaller purpose-built version for book publishers?

— Is there interest in the community to doso?

Thanks,

LRP


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