TeX Live for self publishers

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi Lloyd,

it is difficult to say what is the bare minimum. I am not exactlya
self publisher but I typeset books for several publishers. After
approximately 200 books I can write what I need. Basically my most
important package is zwpagelayout, not because it was developed by me,
but because I sometimes get the page description from the graphical
designer who does not understand computers and does not understand
TeX. I did not want to recalculate the design to the (La)TeX way thus
I developed a package which accepts page dimensions in the same way
how the designers think. The books often contain images therefore the
graphic package is needed. Some books are typeset in two columns thus
the multicol package is needed. If I can decide, I prefer XeLaTeX to
pdflatex. And because many of my books are not in English or even are
multilingual, I need the polyglossia package. You can definitely live
with just a few basic font, in fact the classical typography did not
use a lot of fonts which we have now but if you typeset invitations,
wedding announcement and such, you will need more fonts. I have also a
large collection of commercial fonts because the publishers want them.
I write the source directly in LaTeX and make my own macros because
each book is different Sometimes the source is in XML but the XML
tools are not part of the TeX distros. An example of such a book is
here: http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/bharat.php

If you need some information from my practice, just ask.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml

ne 24. 4. 2022 v 23:41 odesílatel Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> napsal:
>
> 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
>