
TeX Live 2019 - Tomte
https://tug.org/texlive/
======
nanna
40 years of TeX! At this point it's worth emphasising that if you're a regular
user of LaTeX - even and especially via Overleaf - and have a bit of spare
change, please consider supporting the development of the project and the
community by joining the TeX Users Group (TUG).

[https://www.tug.org/](https://www.tug.org/)

Or a local group:

[https://tug.org/usergroups.html](https://tug.org/usergroups.html)

One of the perks of TUG membership is that you get free TeXLive install DVDs
sent to your door every year (as many as you need, in my experience).

You also get a subscription to TugBoat, the TeX Users Group Magazine, which is
full of curios for the TeX aficionado.

[Edited to replace UK TUG group link with link to global TUG directory]

~~~
DangerousPie
Does anybody still use DVDs? I haven't had a machine with a DVD drive in at
least 5 years.

~~~
anonu
Have you ever installed a complete Tex platform? It's about 1GB of packages. I
find the DVD thing a bit funny - but I can imagine it makes installs go quite
a bit faster. And considering its a 40-year old technology - its not like you
_really_ need the latest commit.

~~~
JasonFruit
The worst part of setting up a fresh OS installation for me over a rural
satellite connection is inevitably installing TeX. It takes _forever_ , and
between the OS and it, I won't have any data left for the rest of the month.

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timClicks
OT but readers of this comment section are likely to know.. why is a LaTeX
distribution 5.8GB in size[0]? That feels far too large for a tool that's been
around for decades and primarily deals with text.

[0] [https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-
en.html#x1-18...](https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-
en.html#x1-18063r4)

~~~
nanna
It's 5GB because it includes every single extendable package too, as well as
their documentation (in PDF format, of course). There's a healthy _TeX_
package ecosystem [0]

Windows users have the option of installing via MiKTeX instead of TeXLive, the
benefit being that MiKTeX has a package management system which installs the
base packages at start and then automatically downloads the others as and when
they are needed. [1]

Not sure if that's possible in other OS'?

[0] [https://www.ctan.org/](https://www.ctan.org/)

[1] [https://miktex.org/](https://miktex.org/)

~~~
pletnes
Both texlive and miktex allow selectively installing some packages only. AFAIK
the difference is that miktex will show a popup saying «do you want to install
foopackage?» when you try to compile a document which uses foopackage, and you
don’t have foopackage on your system. Kinda like on ubuntu, you get «you can
install this command by running apt-get install foopackage».

~~~
nanna
But isn't that quite a big difference? MiKTeX will actively download and
install the extra package for you there and then, whereas with TeXLive you'll
need to rerun the installer (?) or download the packages from CTAN?

I must admit I speak as a Linux user who's installed TeX on Windows machines,
but not really gone into detail myself, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
maxnoe
You just run

    
    
         tlmgr install <package>

~~~
nanna
Whaaaa... I had no idea. Thank you!

------
dang
2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479200)

2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7912465](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7912465)

2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4217525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4217525)

------
bayareanative
MacTeX 2019 doesn't appear to be available yet and Homebrew isn't sufficiently
wise to work with pre-releases in-advance to get formulas working sooner
rather than later.

~~~
m000
What are you talking about? MacTeX is already available [1]. MacTex is cask-
only on Homebrew, so there's really not much to test in the formula. You
should be able to bump up the version in the old cask formula and it should
work. Having said that, installing from a cask doesn't make much sense for a
program that releases a new version once per year.

[1] [http://www.tug.org/mactex/](http://www.tug.org/mactex/)

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deg4uss3r
> Current release: TeX Live 2019 is available over the Internet and on DVD. It
> was released on 29 April 2018 ...

Wait was this released yesterday or a year ago yesterday?

------
fxfan
EDIT: Release notes: [https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-
en.html#](https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#)

One technology that has stood the test of time- amazingly well designed TeX by
Donald Knuth and LaTeX by Leslie Lamport.

Plain TeX can be a bit beginner unfriendly because most beginners use LaTeX
and experienced people have their own 'coding style' but it's amazingly
powerful.

I only wish somebody would add the minimum required primitives to plain TeX to
render reflowable text in browsers and ebook readers

TeX was designed for "beautiful" typesetting but it gives you much more
control than that IMHO. I'd urge everyone to try it out once, I use it offline
but I think overleaf.com allows for plain TeX too. (XeTeX may work best for
unicode, it's plain tex + minimal additions for Unicode)

On that note- I am not fond of PDFs because of their awfully poor unicode
search support- does anybody knowledgeable know of a good target format I
should use (and the appropriate drivers?)

~~~
bfirsh
You might like this LaTeX to HTML converter I'm working on:
[https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo](https://github.com/arxiv-
vanity/engrafo)

What primitives do you think need adding to TeX? LaTeXML, which powers
Engrafo, does a pretty good job of converting plain TeX, as well as LaTeX.

~~~
tadfisher
Ironically, Computer Modern is terrible to read on computer displays. It was
designed for ink and toner bleed, and looks great when printed on 1970s-era
Xerox printers [1], but it's far too thin for digital rendering.

I might suggest Bitstream Charter for a well-designed and readable analogue to
CMR for digital use.

[1] [https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-
computer-m...](https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-computer-
modern-wirklich-zu-d%C3%BCnn/) (German language)

~~~
khaled
That is the Type 1 realization of it, the original Metafont outputs bitmaps
tailored for the target device. Unfortunately no widely font rendering library
supports Metafont directly, so they are often converted to Type 1 or OpenType
and loose that capability.

