Dealing with complexity of LaTeX and CPAN is not something I really want to do, especially when I am meeting (paper submission) deadline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, I am not as proficient with it as I used to be, as it has way too much esoterica in getting the exact layouts you want.
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.
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.
I only back up the ShareLatex projects in my Dropbox if for whatever reason I need offline access later. Has worked well so far.
It takes ~5 minutes on travis when I only install what I need.
https://github.com/MaxNoe/texlive-batch-installation/blob/ma...
> COPYRIGHT HOLDER: Yihui Xie and RStudio, Inc.
what license is this? Is this software proprietary?
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.
LuaTeX is the successor of pdfTeX. Much improved. And it can use your local .ttf/.otf/... font files out of the box.
The install is very minimalistic and should not require more than downloading a binary and maybe a config file.
http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/bin/luatex/linux-6...
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.)
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...
