[tex-live] scheme modern

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Thu Jan 6 12:44:48 CET 2011


On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 12:06, Arno Trautmann wrote:
>
> And there begin the problems …
> Either one removes radically all packages that are not needed with
> Xe/lua, or it will indeed result in an only slightly smaller full
> installation.
> Regarding Zdeneks comment: Even if not much disk space will be saved,
> there could be saved a larger /number/ of packages.

My experience with size of (ConTeXt) installation is the following:
- 1/3 of size taken by binaries
- 1/3 of size taken by old fonts
- 1/3 of size taken by new fonts + macros combined

In LaTeX the ratios must be different, but you would spare most disk
size by not shipping any tfm/vf/map/enc files for "modern" TeX
(texmf-dist/fonts contains 1GB, while opentype subfolder only has 70
MB; at least in my installation which might be incomplete; but then it
is also true that many fonts simply don't exist in OpenType format).
However:
- then you will not be able to process anyone's files at all
- XeTeX still depends on cmr fonts I would guess; and it's the same
situation with many other aspects of a modern installation
- in order to really spare space and not ship font files (like in
Antykwa Torunska or Poltawskiego where there are both OpenType and
Type1 versions of fonts), one would need to split font packages in
non-trivial ways (most tfm files are not needed at all, but rm-lmr12
is since it is used in math; at least until Latin Modern releases an
OpenType Math font)

This is not to say that I'm against such an attempt. I just wanted to
point out that fonts mean a considerable penalty in size and
complexity of TL.

If you want to build a new scheme with just the most modern packages
included ... I would get started with an empty list and only add the
necessary ones and others by request. That way it will be easier than
guessing whether anyone needs an ancient unmaintained package that has
always been there.

Mojca



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