TeX Live for self publishers

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sun Apr 24 23:41:42 CEST 2022


Lloyd,

1) You can already install a subset of tl with a single command (after
downloading):

perl install-tl -scheme scheme-small

Nothing more is needed, if you're willing to accept the defaults.
The documentation is all about letting people do things other than the
default.

You do still have to add the newly-created TL bin directory to your
PATH.  We can't do that for you.

2) As implied by the above, if you/colleagues/whomever can define the
set of packages that would be good for "self publishers", we can easily
define it as an additional scheme (e.g., scheme-selfpublish). I could
not begin to guess at what was needed myself. One big question is
whether to include extra fonts, and if so, which fonts. Fonts account
for the majority of disk space in a full system.

3) Just FYI, the "small" scheme in the example above is used for the
"BasicTeX" variant of MacTeX. It includes support for some European
languages and a few additional packages. It does not include extra
fonts. It apparently suffices for many people who just want to "typeset
their thesis", but it's surely not enough for self-publishing.

Here is a list of the existing schemes and their sizes, so you can get a
sense of where things stand.
mbytes               #pkgs
7333 scheme-full      4315
2662 scheme-tetex     1552
1860 scheme-medium    1306
1113 scheme-gust       539
 619 scheme-context    131
 533 scheme-small      322
 254 scheme-basic      118
  73 scheme-minimal     56
   7 scheme-infraonly    7



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