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TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

yihui.name

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#31
post #27
post #7

> If you create a tarball of TinyTeX on macOS or Ubuntu, it will be only 50MB This is excellent and has accelerated my long-term dream: an up-to-date TeX distribution that can live in my home directory in an lz4 (hc) squashfs archive (72M) and be mounted on an as-needed basis. UPDATE: As I had hoped, TinyTeX works in an lz4 squashfs. On my system it's actually a tiny bit faster under squashfs than from my ext4 home p…

What is the advantage of having LaTeX in a squashfs if it's taking up space on your home partition anyway? I can't think of any reason to do this unless you want your LaTeX to be read-only for some reason.

Yeah, I don't know why I said in home directory and just mounted when I need it. Might as well be mounted all the time and system-wide. It just all came out in some kind of rambling excited nonsense.

The TeX Live packages are by far the largest on my system. Last time I looked there were loads of very small and moderately compressible files that caused space usage to be exaggerated.

The only time the non-user TeX directories need to be writeable is to update or install new packages, so it doesn't matter if it it's read only most of the time.

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#32

The other day I saw a resume written in LaTeX. Sorry, that's the height of pretension.

Why? LaTeX is great for typesetting, and let's you focus on the content rather than the formatting. Perfect for resumes really.

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#33
post #26

To be honest, when I am using LaTeX, I just want to write without any interruption. That's why I install texlive-full. Since I am (almost) guaranteed that whatever I encountered, I would be able to do it. Dealing with complexity of LaTeX and CPAN is not something I really want to do, especially when I am meeting (paper submission) deadline.

I agree, in the sense that this comes years too late for me and I would guess most other Linux users. It's easy enough on Linux just to install effectively all of the packages from your package manager, and the couple GBs it takes aren't enough to be a real concern (and I've got my root on an SSD!). However, I can see this being a real benefit to Windows and OSX users, who don't have a native package manager. If you'…

TeX on Mac is nearly as painless as TeX on linux: you just install MacTeX via your preferred software installation method (I use homebrew, but in the past I've downloaded the 5GB dmg and used that), install it and everything pretty much "Just Works"

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#34
post #13
post #12

I grew irritated with texlive and instead just opted to use https://overleaf.com for my LaTeX documents

Overleaf makes you pay for the history feature, and for more than one collaborator. Not good for long term collaborative papers.

They also let you clone a git repo of your project, so you can painlessly move out of Overleaf when you find yourself outgrowing it.

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#35

The other day I saw a resume written in LaTeX. Sorry, that's the height of pretension.

Why? LaTeX is good at what it does, and there are predefined templates for high quality resumes in various layouts (for example see [1] and [2]). I've written more using LaTeX than Word, so it's easier for me (and others I presume) to produce good results for out of the ordinary documents, like a resume, in LaTeX.

[1] https://www.rpi.edu/dept/arc/training/latex/resumes/

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#37
post #23

My favorite part about this article is the extra wide space that follows their apostrophe character. It really gives an air of legitimacy to their LaTeX distribution...

It looks like there is something wrong with the 'Microsoft YaHei' font. Removing that from the font-family fixes the huge space.

In the CJK typography quotes are traditionally as wide as other ideographic characters, with left quotes aligned to the right and right quotes aligned to the left. A Western typographical apostrophe is mapped to a right single quote in Unicode, resulting in a collision. They can only be distinguished by the context.

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#38
post #34
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overleaf makes you pay for the history feature, and for more than one collaborator. Not good for long term collaborative papers.

They also let you clone a git repo of your project, so you can painlessly move out of Overleaf when you find yourself outgrowing it.

Maybe. The deprecated V1 lets you. I'm not sure whether V2 will, at least without paying $12/month.

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#39

The other day I saw a resume written in LaTeX. Sorry, that's the height of pretension.

My resume has been in LaTeX (now XeLaTeX) for many years now for my own convenience (separation of format from content) not pretention. Given that I distribute PDFs, I fail to see how its source format is relevant or even visible - not using Computer Modern fonts.

Re: TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution

#40

To be honest, when I am using LaTeX, I just want to write without any interruption. That's why I install texlive-full. Since I am (almost) guaranteed that whatever I encountered, I would be able to do it. Dealing with complexity of LaTeX and CPAN is not something I really want to do, especially when I am meeting (paper submission) deadline.

This would have been useful for me at one point, when I used LaTeX to make formatted pdf output for a program I was writing. (Making a RPG character builder at a time when I had lots of experience with LaTeX, but none with pdfs directly.) I ended up starting with texlive and making my own very stripped down distribution, with only the libraries that were used in the intermediate .tex file.
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