Minimal installation for TeX (pdflatex/pdftex)?

hruodr said:
No, no, no!!!! He is a mathematician. :)
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You are partially correct. His degrees are in mathematics. Yet, he is a professor of computer science. And his scientific contributions have mostly been to what today is called computer science. What this demonstrates is that the two fields have an overlap, which has been becoming narrower over the last 50 years. In reality, there is a large variety of overlapping fields of study here, and our naming has not kept up with them. I am very happy to see that today many universities have separate departments for computer sciences and computer engineering, since those fields have diverged considerably.

By the way, I highly recommend Don Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics" book. It is the clearest and most fun to read introduction to integer mathematics and combinatorics.

Also: Above I said that Don Knuth is "not a programmer". That statement is true: he is primarily a scientist. But he is also a great programmer. If you read his source code (for example the TeX source, which I have somewhere in book form), it is incredibly well written, cleanly structured, nicely thought out, clean and clear, and well maintainable. It is the product of a good engineer. And he is also perfectly capable of taking other people's code (like Tim's dvips, which is written in C) and working on it (I think Don restructured it over a summer, sometime in the 90s).
 
ralphbsz said:
And he is also perfectly capable of taking other people's code (like Tim's dvips, which is written in C) and working on it (I think Don restructured it over a summer, sometime in the 90s).
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For a minimal TeX package will be necessary to restaurate it by taking away kpathsea: I think some important improvements were done after infecting it with kpathsea.

Also from xdvi kpathsea must be taken away. In spite that there are other viewers, xdvi is very lightweight and can be more lightweight.
 
Tom Rokicki writes in http://www.radicaleye.com the follwing:

To get the latest version of dvips, simply get the latest version of teTeX or some other TeX distribution that includes dvips.
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Namely, dvips is delivered with Karl Berry's (TeXLive chef) initial non transparent inflation (kpathsea).

This dominant position of TeXLive may mean at the end TeX death.
 
hruodr said:
This dominant position of TeXLive may mean at the end TeX death.
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That's very unlikely. TeX has survived a lot more events than most other pieces of software that are of comparable complexity.

Also, I don't understand your problem with kpathsea. It's a library that made life a lot easier. I remember when it was introduced in the 90s. At that time I was using Eberhard Mattes' emTeX distribution, and later switched to Thomas Esser's teTeX, the predecessor of TeX Live.

By the way, TeX has always been a large piece of software, in relation to the disk sizes of the respective time. In fact, it has gotten smaller: In the first half of the 90s, I had to devote more than 10 % of my disk space to TeX. Today it's far less than 1 %.
 
olli@ said:
Also, I don't understand your problem with kpathsea. It's a library that made life a lot easier.
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With mf and the source of fonts you generate tfm and gf files, and from the last eventually pk files with gftopk. tfm files goes to a directory where tex reads them, gf and pk files to directories where programs like dvips and xdvi read them. You can have scripts and makefiles to make life a little easier. Perhaps kpathsea makes life a lot easier for people that cannot keep order of his files, cannot run some commandos and are clueless about how the system works. For other people should be just unnecessary bloat that obscures the system.
 
hruodr said:
Tom Rokicki writes in http://www.radicaleye.com the follwing:



Namely, dvips is delivered with Karl Berry's (TeXLive chef) initial non transparent inflation (kpathsea).

This dominant position of TeXLive may mean at the end TeX death.
Click to expand...

If you note this, I believe that it would be urgent proceed to de-infection of TeX.

If anyone has time, please have fun converting the original code to something "lighter".
 
hruodr said:
With mf and the source of fonts you generate tfm and gf files, and from the last eventually pk files with gftopk. tfm files goes to a directory where tex reads them, gf and pk files to directories where programs like dvips and xdvi read them. You can have scripts and makefiles to make life a little easier. Perhaps kpathsea makes life a lot easier for people that cannot keep order of his files, cannot run some commandos and are clueless about how the system works. For other people should be just unnecessary bloat that obscures the system.
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That's a gross underestimation of the complexity of a TeX system. Apparently you haven't been using TeX for very long.
 
With a source code of about 35 GB (yep, .... gigabytes), TeX might be called a bit large - and likely complex.
It can be anyhow complex to make a pkg available in few megabytes, because of the required dependencies to get full features.

Ideally, keep focus the thread topic, which possibility or possibilities (list) would be given, in order to offer a binary pkg installation, i.e. base, that would be much less than 2.5 Gigabytes ?
 
I'm sorry, but your 35GB figure is not for TeX itself. I have no idea what it is for.

As I said above: The source code for TeX and MF has been published in book form. You can buy it in a book store, or find it in a good library nearby and read it. You can also download the source code in the Web language (which has nothing to do with the world-wide-web, it is a programming language designed by Don Knuth); the book is made from the same source code as the executable program. It is probably many MB, perhaps dozens. A skilled software engineer can preprocess and compile TeX and MF from the source code and make it work. Then you need to download a dvi output driver (for example dvips, preferably the dvipsk version). The source code for TeX, MF and dvips has not changed significantly in the last 20 years. We used to have it installed on NeXT and on VAXes, at a time when a typical main disk drive in a computer was 600MB in size (yes, I still have the MicroVAX and its 600MB disk drive sitting in my basement, and it should have a TeX installation on it, although I have not booted it in ~15 years).

Really, there are two paths. You can have skill, and install LaTeX and MF from source, and make it as efficient and small as you like (or as full-featured as you like). Or you can download the package and install it, but then please don't complain about the fact that the package maintainer has chosen to make it easy to use and feature rich.
 
ralphbsz said:
As I said above: The source code for TeX and MF has been published in book form. You can buy it in a book store, or find it in a good library nearby and read it. You can also download the source code in the Web language (which has nothing to do with the world-wide-web, it is a programming language designed by Don Knuth); the book is made from the same source code as the executable program. It is probably many MB, perhaps dozens. A skilled software engineer can preprocess and compile TeX and MF from the source code and make it work. Then you need to download a dvi output driver (for example dvips, preferably the dvipsk version). The source code for TeX, MF and dvips has not changed significantly in the last 20 years. We used to have it installed on NeXT and on VAXes, at a time when a typical main disk drive in a computer was 600MB in size (yes, I still have the MicroVAX and its 600MB disk drive sitting in my basement, and it should have a TeX installation on it, although I have not booted it in ~15 years).
Click to expand...

This is maybe some idealistic dreams. Reality is rather that the packages are today getting large rapidly.

web.tex

It would be rather interesting to look at files, which allows TeX compilation (including results size as well) in details.
 
Actually why to use TeX since the produre PS document from Huodr has already an excellent quality. It needs just section, subsections,... and maybe additional little features.

It would be simple to maintain, definitely small and producing high quality print.

Just for PDFLATEX or PDFTEX or TEX = 1 Gigabyte minimum ...

pkg install -y texlive-texmf texlive-base
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.txz: 100% 944 B 0.9kB/s 00:01
Fetching packagesite.txz: 100% 6 MiB 1.7MB/s 00:04
Processing entries: 100%
FreeBSD repository update completed. 31962 packages processed.
All repositories are up to date.
The following 12 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED:
texlive-texmf: 20150523_4
texlive-base: 20150521_31
texlive-tlmgr: 20150523_2
tex-kpathsea: 6.2.1_2
teckit: 2.5.7
xpdfopen: 0.86
tex-ptexenc: 1.3.3_2
libpotrace: 1.12
libgd: 2.2.5_1,1
zziplib: 0.13.69_1
tex-web2c: 20150521_3
t1lib: 5.1.2_4,1

Number of packages to be installed: 12

The process will require 1 GiB more space.
596 MiB to be downloaded.
 
The postscript interpreter needs probably more resources than TeX. TeX is also necessary, because it is like a standard.
 
Spartrekus said:
If anyone has time, please have fun converting the original code to something "lighter".
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You can begin.

xdvi exsists without kpathsea and compiles in FreeBSD with two little fixes. Se here:

forums.freebsd.org

C - #ifndef _SYS_FILE_H_

Perhaps could someone download and try to compile the following: https://math.berkeley.edu/~vojta/xdvi/xdvi-22.86.tar.gz I get errors like In file included from events.c:132: /usr/include/sys/file.h:221:2: error: unknown type name 'u_int' u_int xf_flag; /* flags (see fcntl.h)...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

It seems to be that one can clean the source of dvips from kpathsea. It is with the source of TeXlive.

Working with the TeX sources to compile them you will learn a lot of good programming.
 
hruodr said:
You can begin.

xdvi exsists without kpathsea and compiles in FreeBSD with two little fixes. Se here:

forums.freebsd.org

C - #ifndef _SYS_FILE_H_

Perhaps could someone download and try to compile the following: https://math.berkeley.edu/~vojta/xdvi/xdvi-22.86.tar.gz I get errors like In file included from events.c:132: /usr/include/sys/file.h:221:2: error: unknown type name 'u_int' u_int xf_flag; /* flags (see fcntl.h)...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

It seems to be that one can clean the source of dvips from kpathsea. It is with the source of TeXlive.

Working with the TeX sources to compile them you will learn a lot of good programming.
Click to expand...

Why not to rewrite TeX completely from scratch. Basically it is only (hm hm) just a web file.
tex.web.

;)
 
hruodr said:
Only for respecting Donald Knuth. That is enough a reason. He deserves this respect. If you think, you can do better, then you must write your own program. I suggested a postscript editor.
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He might certainly have interests to see a readily human accessible file for studying how TeX works for education purpose.

Guess, the web code needs to be converted to single C file for education matters, without billions of necessary (un)maintained libraries or additional features.

Not necessarily to remake it, but to clean what is today "modern". TeX looks a bit like an Android mobile phone.
What you called "infected", I think that it is a good.

He strived to give a minimal TeX, stable, reliable, and that was perfect. It was basically just one major web file, powered TeX. The markup language gets converted to create dvi (and so on).
However, his perfect has incremented by "add-ons", and you know how TeX look like... it is actually modern.
 
Which packages (pkg) holds pdflatex binary?

I installed 1.5 gigabytes already of TeX, with texmf and base, ... and still pdflatex is not there. Where is it?

I hope so much that it won't be tex - full .... :(
 
Spartrekus said:
Which packages (pkg) holds pdflatex binary?
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There is no such thing as a “pdflatex binary”. There is also no latex binary, because latex is just a macro package (“format”) that gets pre-loaded for TeX. In the same sense, pdflatex is just pdftex with the latex format pre-loaded. (All of these are symlinks. The respective format is loaded automatically according to the symlink's name.)

The tex and pdftex binaries are contained in the tex-basic-engines package (port /print/tex-basic-engines). The latex and pdflatex formats (along with the appropriate symlinks) are contained in the tex-formats package (port print/tex-formats). You get these automatically when you install texlive-full.
 
My self built "minimal" TeXlive contain latex.fmt in texmf-var/web2c/pdftex/latex.fmt.

The latex link to pdftex reads from there the precompiled latex macros.

In texmf-var/web2c/tex/tex.fmt are the precompiled macros read by a simple tex command: "plain tex" macros. But I have my own version in my home directory.
 
hruodr said:
My self built "minimal" TeXlive contain latex.fmt in texmf-var/web2c/pdftex/latex.fmt.

The latex link to pdftex reads from there the precompiled latex macros.

In texmf-var/web2c/tex/tex.fmt are the precompiled macros read by a simple tex command: "plain tex" macros. But I have my own version in my home directory.
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How did you manage to get your "own" version? I want it too ;)
 
It is more about size , but you can discuss about CVs and his research areas.

News, so errata.
I reinstalled FreeBSD v.12, and actually it is not 1.5 Gb to get PDFLATEX but 2.5 GB
pkg install texlive-base tex-formats


So another approach is to install just 14 MB and/or much more.
tex-web2c <--- this will increase the size with about 150 MiB Extras (skip! FreeBSD will install Wayland during this),
tex-kpathsea <-- very small,
tex-ptexecnc <-- very small.

Once <14mb done, you can use ftp.
ftp ftp://ftp.cvut.cz
Go into tex-archive
you can then get the knuth original web files, and then convert/compile.
Use tangle,...

Forget to compile it with clang, you need GNU GCC (Linux).

Copy GNU make into the /usr/bin/
You need gmake (Linux).

alt: https://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/blfs/conglomeration/texlive/texlive-20180414-source.tar.xz
tar xf texlive-20180414-source.tar.xz
./configure --enable-build-in-source-tree
make
make install

Delete the compiled source directory of several GB size.

Check that you have also texmf-config texmf-local texmf-var (small less than 5 mb) into /usr/local/share. Basically one can produce a pdf document with cmr10 with dpi 600, with only the cmr files.
It is not needed to install 1.5 GB therefore ;)

Furthermore,
Installing with pkg install tex-basic-engines, then you will end with pdftex with just additional 4 MiB more downloaded. pdftohtml pdftops pdftotext pdftex is there.
Then, you will need to copy the fmt files manually to make it work.
But then from dvi to pdf, it requires 21Mb additional: "tex-dvipsk-5.995_2 Convert a TeX DVI file to PostScript" including dvips / dvipdf. But there it is 2 GB extras. dvips is likely not the best way either, as indicated above.

Probably quite interesting.
pkg install tex-basic-engines will install wayland !


www.freebsd.org

Explaining BSD

Brief explanation about BSD
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org
It would be interesting to bring TeX on Unix/BSD/* systems : https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/

Page Redirection

www.nordier.com
 
Valuable lectures / Stanford:

www.youtube.com

Donald Knuth Lectures

View Computer Musings, lectures given by Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. The Stanford Center f...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

 
I would really appreciate it if you stopped spreading FUD, and actually tried to listen to what other people write.

Spartrekus said:
Is there so far a solution to install less than 1.5 GB for only pdftex and pdflatex?
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“Butter bei die Fische”, as we say in Germany …
These are the sizes of the TeX-related packages on my machine (stable/12, amd64), sorted by size in MB:
Code: 
texlive-full-20150521             0.000
tex-ptexenc-1.3.3_2               0.088
tex-synctex-1.17.0_1              0.239
tex-libtexlua-5.2.4               0.653
tex-kpathsea-6.2.1_1              0.743
tex-xdvik-22.87_4                 1.060
tex-libtexluajit-2.0.3            1.400
tex-dvipdfmx-20150315_1           1.660
tex-aleph-1.15.2.1.r.4_4          2.520
tex-basic-engines-20150521        3.600
tex-web2c-20150521_2              4.890
tex-xmltex-1.9_2                  7.920
texlive-tlmgr-20150523_2         10.300
tex-jadetex-3.13_3               11.200
texlive-base-20150521_28         11.800
tex-dvipsk-5.995_1               21.500
tex-formats-20150521_2           34.300
tex-xetex-0.99992_18             37.000
tex-luatex-0.80.0_9              47.000
texlive-texmf-20150523_4       1350.000
texlive-docs-20150523          1580.000
As you can see, the largest packages by far are docs and texmf (mainly font data). If you think you don't need the docs installed locally (many of them are available online), you can just remove them and save about 1.5 GB. As far as the texmf package goes – Well, if you want to use a type setting system, you're going to need fonts.

All the other TeX packages together are just 200 MB. For comparison: Chromium is 250 MB, Gimp is 130 MB, Scribus is 130 MB, InkScape is 125 MB. It's all the same order of magnitude.

Forget to compile it with clang, you need GNU GCC (Linux).
[…] You need gmake (Linux).
Click to expand...
GNU is not Linux. You are allowing your hatred of Linux to cloud your mind.
 
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