
TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution - jaap_w
https://yihui.name/tinytex/
======
innocenat
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.

~~~
bscphil
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're going to be in the unfortunate
position of managing LaTeX packages manually, it would be great to have a low-
friction way to do that and a minimal portable distribution to start with.

My one actual criticism is the name: it should be TinyLaTeX. TeX and LaTeX are
two different things.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
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"

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I haven't used it in a long time, but MikTeX on Windows was really easy too
back in the 2000s.

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graycat
For 10+ years I've been a big fan of D. Knuth's TeX with Knuth's original
macros Plain. I have about 70 TeX macros of my own. That _setup_ is for all my
higher quality word processing from ordinary letters to mathematics, and I
regard it as fine. For that word processing, that setup is fine, a done deal.

I looked at LaTeX, got the basic books, etc. and concluded that (A) Knuth's
documentation in _The TeXBook_ is relatively short, well written, and
essentially totally free of bugs, and it is easy to write more macros and (B)
the LaTeX documentation is much longer, less well written, for the internal
logic much harder to understand, maybe with bugs if only from the length and
complexity and being so big and complicated, and much more difficult for me to
write more macros. So, I've just stayed with TeX and never used LaTeX except
once when I downloaded a paper in LaTeX and wanted to format and read it.

Lesson: TeX itself, the design, documentation, functionality, and code are
really quite good, and for some people LaTeX may be less good. Don't rush to
give up on TeX.

~~~
mohammedbin
As someone who prefers TeX- i'd say the comparison goes this way(very
roughly)-

TeX:

* Assembly language or C of typesetting. Gives you fine control * useful when you have various differrnt formats and don't want to learn a new latex template for everything.

LaTex:

* Java of typesetting * Amazing set of libraries and very useful if you work on relatively few well defined formats.

------
craigsmansion
TeX people are unsung heroes to me and about as close to magic as software can
get.

It's like an ancient secret order that is keeping the world safe from word-
processors.

I have no idea of what they do, or how they do it, but I can't argue with the
world-class results.

~~~
xvilka
The biggest problem that most of the publishers still do not accept LaTeX
submissions. Especially if you want to publish a book.

~~~
romwell
Hello from the world of math! Very sorry to hear about your sufferings.

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dpwm
> 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 partition.

~~~
bscphil
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.

~~~
dpwm
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.

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Tarq0n
Yihui Xie has been an incredible boon for the R & Pandoc ecosystems. Turning
your R code into pdf or html is so easy I'm surprised language authors aren't
scrambling to copy the feature.

~~~
kylebarron
It's because other languages like Python and Julia would usually just use
something like Jupyter Notebooks, and those can be converted to PDF using
nbconvert.

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xvilka
It is notable that LaTeX development moved to GitHub [1] and anyone can send a
pull request without much hassle.

[1] [https://github.com/latex3](https://github.com/latex3)

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osamagirl69
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...

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

~~~
lifthrasiir
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.

------
kmundnic
Some time ago I was trying to include more than one bibliography in a
document. After a day or so trying to make it work with the MacTex
installation, I checked if it would work with ShareLatex. Worked at the first
try, changing nothing in my files. From then, I never looked back.

I only back up the ShareLatex projects in my Dropbox if for whatever reason I
need offline access later. Has worked well so far.

------
goerz
I have some projects where the continuous-integration-testing with Travis
requires a tex installation. More than 50% of the entire test run is spent
installing texlive-full (since Travis doesn't seem interested in including
latex in their standard environment). Maybe TinyTeX will be able to speed this
up?

~~~
maxnoe
I wrote a python package to install texlive without user interaction in a
customizable way. Not installing docs and sources already shaves off half.

It takes ~5 minutes on travis when I only install what I need.

[https://github.com/MaxNoe/texlive-batch-
installation/blob/ma...](https://github.com/MaxNoe/texlive-batch-
installation/blob/master/README.md)

------
pletnes
In my experience, TeX needs some packaging/distribution love. Also in my
experience, overleaf/sharelatex (web based) blows all of the local
installation approaches out of the water. Especially with respect to
collaboration with coauthors of your documents.

~~~
FredFS456
Sharelatex merged with (was bought by?) Overleaf a while ago. Now we're just
down to using Overleaf v2.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
you can still use v1 (but they don't make easy)

------
rambojazz
> YEAR: 2017-2018

> COPYRIGHT HOLDER: Yihui Xie and RStudio, Inc.

what license is this? Is this software proprietary?

~~~
pingiun
It's CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, there's a license link on the top of the page.

------
EdSchouten
Shamelessly promoting something that I wrote myself:

[https://github.com/ProdriveTechnologies/bazel-
latex](https://github.com/ProdriveTechnologies/bazel-latex)

These are rules for building LaTeX documents using the Bazel build system.
What's pretty nifty is that these download (parts of) TeXLive automatically,
meaning that you don't even need to install TeXLive in your home directory.
Instead, it's part of your project, meaning that everyone working on it will
use exactly the same version of TeXLive.

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Koshkin
On a tangential note, I wish there were a single-executable "distribution" of
Plain TeX that would simply "do one thing well" \- convert a TeX source to
more or less nicely typeset PDF.

~~~
taeric
I've found more than several tools that all basically complete this task.
latexmk -pdf Foo.tex, being the most common one that I can remember.

It is somewhat annoying that it will create so many temp files. I guess. I've
gotten over it pretty heavily. (I actually regret not looking at the log file
more often. I feel I should know how to read most of that.)

~~~
JorgeGT
LaTeXTools in Sublime et al. will erase the temp files with a shortcut, plus
you can add more extensions to clean in case you use packages that add more
temp files.

~~~
taeric
I think there is almost a rite of passage for people getting into latex to
create their own build tools. :)

------
amai
On Mac I prefer BasicTex:
[https://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html](https://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html)

One can install it very simple via

$ brew cask install basictex

And it doesn't take ages to download and install like other TeX-Distributions.

see also [https://bilalakil.me/getting-started-and-productive-with-
lat...](https://bilalakil.me/getting-started-and-productive-with-latex-
basictex-on-os-x-terminal/)

------
ahriman
I grew irritated with texlive and instead just opted to use
[https://overleaf.com](https://overleaf.com) for my LaTeX documents

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

~~~
chongli
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.

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

------
mechnesium
I think various flavors of Markdown have largely superseded TeX, at least for
stylistic minimalists. I'm not saying that TeX is obsolete, but for the
majority of use cases, Markdown is faster and less troublesome. Modernity
always triumphs.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Except if you want a PDF version you're likely converting markdown->TeX->PDF

