TeX Live, Tiny TeX, AWS Lambda and reworking TeX for modern times

[Henri Menke]

On Wed, 2021-01-06 at 20:11 +0000, Jonathan Fine wrote:
> Note:  This is a spin off from a message sent by Norbert to texhax, which I'm
> responding to on tex-live.
> https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2021-January/024797.html
> 
> Hi Norbert
> 
> Summary: Thank you for your interest in a reworked TeX for modern times. Here
> are some good ideas (from Yihui Xie and Sam O'Connor) that I'd like the TeX
> Live team to develop further.
> 
> You wrote that you're eager to hear my proposal for a reworked TeX for modern
> times.
> 
> Here's an example, but it's not my work. It's TinyTeX. It's author Yihui Xie
> writes that it is a lightweight, cross-platform, portable, and easy-to-
> maintain LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live. In particular, it works well
> for R users.

TinyTeX is just a TeX Live installer which doesn't default to scheme-full but
instead only installs this subset of packages:

https://tinytex.yihui.org/pkgs-custom.txt

Whether that is more “modern” is debatable.

Cheers, Henri

> Here's the URLs for the project webpage, the CRAN entry, and The R Journal
> (which is typeset using TeX). And also from the author's 2019 TUGBoat article
> on TinyTeX.
> 
> https://yihui.org/tinytex/
> https://yihui.org/tinytex/#motivation
> https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/tinytex/index.html
> https://journal.r-project.org/
> 
> The author of TinyTeX thanked the TeX Live team for their work, particularly
> offering options to remove source code and documentation from the
> installation. Also, the author wrote an article on TinyTex for the 2019
> TUGBoat.
> https://yihui.org/tinytex/#acknowledgements
> https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124xie-tinytex.pdf
> 
> My view is that TinyTeX has been a great enabler for the authors and editors
> of The R Journal. I suggest that other journals and communities would benefit
> from TinyTeX or something similar where "you install [only the] LaTeX packages
> you actually need".
> 
> Related to this is Sam O'Connor's tex-live announcement: TeX Live on AWS
> Lambda.
> https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2018-March/041304.html
> 
> I've posted this to the tex-live list, as being more relevant than texhax and
> tug-members. Finally, you're welcome to come to my TeX Office hour tomorrow
> (Thursday) on zoom, and appreciate that my preferred hour is awkward in your
> time zone.
> 
> But I'd like to give Sam and Yihui a chance to read and respond to this
> message first. I'll contact them off-list about this. And perhaps we could
> establish a more convenient time zone.
> 
> with best regards
> 
> Jonathan
> 
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