# Minimal installation for TeX (pdflatex/pdftex)?



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

Hello, 

What would be the possibility of minimal installation for TeX (i.e to get just pdflatex and pdftex)?

Miktex runs on about 150 mb, Texlive can be also relatively small (less than 300 mb). texlive-texmf might increase a lot the size as shown:

```
New packages to be INSTALLED:
        texlive-texmf: 20150523_4

Number of packages to be installed: 1

The process will require 1 GiB more space.
589 MiB to be downloaded.
```

Looking forward to hearing you.
Kind regards


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

If you get Knuths pascal sources compiled, then you get a real minimal TeX. For latex you need pdftex, I do not know the sources. Perhaps Donald Knuth wants exactly that: that people write their own compiler.  Unfortunately there is no out of the box unbloated TeX, although TeX is far, very far away of being bloat.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> If you get Knuths pascal sources compiled, then you get a real minimal TeX. For latex you need pdftex, I do not know the sources. Perhaps Donald Knuth wants exactly that: that people write their own compiler.  Unfortunately there is no out of the box unbloated TeX, although TeX is far, very far away of being bloat.



A main original "converter" of TeX to PDF was firstly made during a Phd. in CZ (EU).
miktex is a workaround, but well.

Btw, do you like automake, cmake,... bison to compile C?

There isn't a sort of code that does that?


----------



## getopt (Feb 8, 2019)

Unfortunatelly the FreeBSD ports for Tex are a crap. This is because of the dependency madness and the unwillingness to maintain tex ports properly.

TeX Live - Quick install

Start the TeX Live installation by downloading install-tl-unx.tar.gz (3.3mb) for everything else.
Extract to /usr/local/texlive/install-tl-unx
Replace symlink /usr/local/share/tlpkg with empty directory
start perl install-tl and download what you need.
Welcome to TeX Live!

See /usr/local/texlive/2018/index.html for links to documentation.
The TeX Live web site (http://tug.org/texlive/) contains any updates and
corrections. TeX Live is a joint project of the TeX user groups around the
world; please consider supporting it by joining the group best for you. The
list of groups is available on the web at http://tug.org/usergroups.html.

Add /usr/local/texlive/2018/texmf-dist/doc/man to MANPATH.
Add /usr/local/texlive/2018/texmf-dist/doc/info to INFOPATH.
Most importantly, add /usr/local/texlive/2018/bin/i386-freebsd
to your PATH for current and future sessions.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Btw, do you like automake, cmake,... bison to compile C?



That things contribute to bloating. Better is to configure by editing a file and then do `make`. But that is not the problem here. And there is such a code: you can get it from texlive with some effort.

TeX is written in simplified pascal (like C no procedure definition inside procedures), but a pascal dialect for which there is now compiler. web2c converts this pascal to C, but is bloated with a package called kpathsea: it is not like translated knuths original.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> That things contribute to bloating. Better is to configure by editing a file and then do `make`. But that is not the problem here. And there is such a code: you can get it from texlive with some effort.
> 
> TeX is written in simplified pascal (like C no procedure definition inside procedures), but a pascal dialect for which there is now compiler. web2c converts this pascal to C, but is bloated with a package called kpathsea: it is not like translated knuths original.



Did he write it with fp (fp-ide) turbo pascal originally?


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

getopt said:


> Start the TeX Live installation by downloading install-tl-unx.tar.gz (3.3mb) for everything else.



The whole source of TeX contain 4.6mb:






						CTAN: /tex-archive/systems/knuth
					






					www.ctan.org


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Did he write it with fp (fp-ide) turbo pascal originally?



No, I think it was a Pascal for DEC System 10 called H-Pascal.

Pascal is/was not standarised, dialects may differ on small things, but enough to block compiling with false compiler.

There is a program called p2c to transform pascal to C: perhaps you can modify it to compile TeX.

The dialect is decribed in the very program that Knuth wrote: it is a mixture of TeX documentation and the Pascal program that you can separate with the programs `weave` and `tangle` delivered with TeX.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> No, I think it was a Pascal for DEC System 10 called H-Pascal.
> 
> Pascal is/was not standarised, dialects may differ on small things, but enough to block compiling with false compiler.
> 
> ...


thank you !!!

Maybe the plain TeX (the original plain TeX / not latex) .- basic compiler is easier to convert or to compile from Pascal source code....


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Maybe the plain TeX (the original plain TeX / not latex) .- basic compiler is easier to convert or to compile from Pascal source code....



I never saw the source of pdftex, but as far as I know it is a modified TeX from the source. Then it should compile with the same Pascal compiler. Latex are then TeX macros written on pdftex, should be not a problem.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> I never saw the source of pdftex, but as far as I know it is a modified TeX from the source. Then it should compile with the same Pascal compiler. Latex are then TeX macros written on pdftex, should be not a problem.


I think so far that he produces first the PS file and then make the PDF, if this remembering is correct.
Example of PS file.


			http://www.lob.de/pdf/helloworld.pdf
		


% PostScript: "Hello, world!" of file test.ps
/Courier findfont 24 scalefont setfont
100 100 moveto (Hello, world!) show showpage

ps2pdf test.ps
mupdf test.pdf

Done.

Maybe ps2pdf is the only needed file executable.
The rest is just a markup language.

Another example:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello World!
\end{document}

latex test.tex     // makes dvi file
dvips test.dvi    // makes the ps file
ps2pdf test.ps   // makes the pdf file

Actually, with this method, one need only the package :   texlive-base, which is actually much less, but once one go the DVI file.
In there, there are:    ps2pdf and dvipdf, which can convert a dvi file to PDF.

But it seems that /usr/local/bin/latex is missing.
This file has been forgotten in FreeBSD, see https://packages.debian.org/stretch/texlive-latex-base
latex is present in the source file: http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/de...e-base/texlive-base_2016.20170123.orig.tar.xz


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Maybe ps2pdf is the only needed file executable.



Yes, with Knuths TeX and dvips that is enough to obtain a pdf file. But pdftex provides more than TeX, an extension of TeX that latex requires:






						Future releases of LaTeX will require an eTeX-enabled engine
					

LaTeX2e will require an eTeX-enabled engine



					www.latex-project.org


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

Creating a dvi file without TEX : https://tug.org/pracjourn/2007-1/cho/cho.pdf

echo hello world > plaintex.tex ; echo "\\bye" >> plaintex.tex ; pdftex -output-format=dvi  plaintex.tex will produce an example for studying it.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

getopt said:


> The 4.6mb are NOT the whole size of Tex Live. It's the size of the installer.



No, the installer is a bloat of 3.3mb, the whole TeX and Metafont, including the TeX- and MF-Book, is 4.6mb, and textlive is a big bloatbomb of more than a Gigabyte. It is really a tragedy what TeX live did from TeX. tetex was a bloat, but texlive is by far much worse. A new, meager, portable, transparent distribution of TeX is really necessary.

I use only plain TeX, need dvips, but the minimal installation of Texlive are about 300mb, as* Spartrekus* noted.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Creating a dvi file without TEX : https://tug.org/pracjourn/2007-1/cho/cho.pdf



But perhaps is better to write a program for making easier the writing of usable postscript files.

Postscript, a real programming language, is much more expressive than dvi files. With it you can not only write text, but also draw. Since decades there are printers that understand directly postcript (MacWriter was the first and had a more powerful processor than the Mac). Ghostscript translates postscript to other languages of other printers. There is a lot of support for postscript files (viewers).


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> But perhaps is better to write a program for making easier the writing of usable postscript files.
> 
> Postscript, a real programming language, is much more expressive than dvi files. With it you can not only write text, but also draw. Since decades there are printers that understand directly postcript (MacWriter was the first and had a more powerful processor than the Mac). Ghostscript translates postscript to other languages of other printers. There is a lot of support for postscript files (viewers).



I don't know, either  DVI or  PS. It is the same for me.
DVI looks binary so far, from pdftex --output-format=dvi....
Actually the most important is the number of library dependencies related.
The less libraries and dependencies, the better. None, just clang and VT ANSI would be ideal 

I think that first was PS, and DVI came after.

*PostScript* (PS) is a page description *language* in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing business. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming *language* and was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984.

PS and DVI were born at almost same time.
DVI looks to me to need to create binary. PS looks more markup language - readable.
PS is hard to make - long for a single page with hello world.
DVI is much smaller, just hello world.

man tex
actually /usr/local/bin/tex is the main file, which might make dvi.
echo "\font\tenrm=cmr10 \tenrm M \bye" > test.tex
tex test.tex

Smaller and smaller ...  Just 20 Mb....
What's into tex binary?
...
As said web2c will make the tex binary.
web.ch is the interesting file.

"Web2C is an implementation of TeX and friends which translates the original WEB sources written by Donald Knuth into C, so they can be readily compiled on modern systems. Kpathsea is a library providing path searching and other common functionality that Web2C and other programs use."
Example of binaries: http://mirrors.ctan.org/systems/os2/web2c-6.1/binary/web2c.zip

It seems:
weave tex.web
and then compiling the file with tex or pdftex. The program code is obtained by running
tangle tex.web
that produces tex.p.

"TeX is written in simplified pascal (like C no procedure definition inside procedures), but a pascal dialect for which there is now compiler. web2c converts this pascal to C, but is bloated with a package called kpathsea: it is not like translated knuths original."
Actually a just rewrite of  main binary "tex" in C , like tex.c , would do it - and it would avoid all scripting (web2c, ... pl,...).
Is that right?


----------



## rigoletto@ (Feb 8, 2019)

See: D18903


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Smaller and smaller ...  Just 20 Mb....
> What's into tex binary?



Perhaps debugging symbols? I compiled my own TeX and have 1274752 bytes, also a lot. Perhaps kpathsea is the inflation source.



Spartrekus said:


> Actually a just rewrite of main binary "tex" in C , like tex.c , would do it - and it would avoid all scripting (web2c, ... pl,...).
> Is that right?



No rewrite necessary, the conversion of the pascal dialect to C should be very easy to do automatically, this means a new web2c program if you like. The rest should be straighforward: you translate and compile first tangle.p from the tex source, then use it to extract pascal files from the web files that you also translate and compile.

*rigoletto@*, it seems MiKTeX is also bloat. 150 mb for installation file, download of 1.3 GB necessary, then 2.4 GB On disk.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Perhaps debugging symbols? I compiled my own TeX and have 1274752 bytes, also a lot. Perhaps kpathsea is the inflation source.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Well, my just generated dvi files are * 224 kilo bytes *.

I wonder if it is necessary all those converting, converting,.... to bring full installation of 1 GB.
2.4 GB is pretty interesting.

Luatex : http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-3/tb96hoekwater-pascal.pdf

A small rewrite in C language programming language would make it for sure - in less than 2 MB.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

I do not think the conversion is the problem: as said, it is straightforward. Donald Knuth is wise and wrote it in a limited dialect of Pascal for easy and efficient conversion. You can consider TeX as written in C with some trivial syntactic, but harmless errors to correct automatically with a program. That is sure not the source of the bloat.

Luatex is the result of some kid bloating TeX because they like lua so much. Always installed with texlive, also in "minimal" installations, because texlive people like bloat.


----------



## rigoletto@ (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr rather easier to maintain than the texlive total mess.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> I do not think the conversion is the problem: as said, it is straightforward. Donald Knuth is wise and wrote it in a limited dialect of Pascal for easy and efficient conversion. You can consider TeX as written in C with some trivial syntactic, but harmless errors to correct automatically with a program. That is sure not the source of the bloat.



Likely the best would be to have a pascal source file, then, process of hand  PASCAL (DEC) => C could happen step by step.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

rigoletto@ said:


> hruodr rather easier to maintain than the texlive total mess.



Even better... !
Get the source over subversion .....  Only *35 GB*


			Subversion (and Git) - TeX Live - TeX Users Group
		


I am sure Knuth didn't want this to happen.

I can't believe that no single person did make a rewrite of it.
To create a dvi file - it seems fairly possible.

Maybe it has something to do with modern education and school content.
Probably, it has something to do with software engineering education ; they might benefit to REINTRODUCE Pascal and C language.
I recommend fp-ide in terminal (Pascal) on Raspberry PI for each student during labs.
Make your proejct light and efficient.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

No, really not by hand, never, please, use `weave` and get the description of the pascal from the TeX sources, then you will understand what I am saying. The translation is not the source of bloat.



Spartrekus said:


> I can't believe that no single person did make a rewrite of it.



TeX is good, very good, no rewrite is necessary. But it would be nice if someone write an alternative, a new typography program, and the best would be to generate postscript directly.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> No, really not by hand, never, please, use `weave` and get the description of the pascal from the TeX sources, then you will understand what I am saying. The translation is not the source of bloat.
> 
> 
> 
> TeX is good, very good, no rewrite is necessary. But it would be nice if someone write an alternative, a new typography program, and the best would be to generate postscript directly.


Sounds the widest - but actually PS needs fonts.
Example: 
</usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr10.pfb>[1] 

echo 'This is a test of Hello World \bye'  > test.tex
pdftex --output-format=dvi test.tex 
Output written on test.dvi (1 page, 244 bytes).

dvips  test.dvi 
This is dvips(k) 5.996 Copyright 2016 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com)
' TeX output 2019.02.08:1849' -> test.ps
</usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/dvips/base/tex.pro>
</usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/dvips/base/texps.pro>. 
</usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr10.pfb>[1] 

du -hs test.ps
28K    test.ps

This PS file is quite large actually.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

You always need the fonts. A dvi file does not contain them and need them in external files, a ps file contain them and is hence bigger. You send the ps file to the printer with the fonts.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> No, really not by hand, never, please, use `weave` and get the description of the pascal from the TeX sources, then you will understand what I am saying. The translation is not the source of bloat.
> 
> 
> 
> TeX is good, very good, no rewrite is necessary. But it would be nice if someone write an alternative, a new typography program, and the best would be to generate postscript directly.



A basic example seems to work actually. 
PS file with font, and a simple example.








						GitHub - spartrekus/ps-examples
					

Contribute to spartrekus/ps-examples development by creating an account on GitHub.




					github.com


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Postscript is an elegant language, like forth, but it seems it is not comfortable enough to write everyday text like TeX. Perhaps this can be solved writing a "postscript editor" that helps writing everyday texts with postscript, helps drwaing with postscript and also helps learning postscript. Perhaps it can be done with Tcl/Tk?


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Postscript is an elegant language, like forth, but it seems it is not comfortable enough to write everyday text like TeX. Perhaps this can be solved writing a "postscript editor" that helps writing everyday texts with postscript, helps drwaing with postscript and also helps learning postscript. Perhaps it can be done with Tcl/Tk?



Just in C - it is easy to convert a Tex (basics \section(),...) to PS format.
C is fine for this - and it depends on nothing - just PS2PDF.

It works like this.
showpage is to make this page
moveto  starts from bottom :  10 is left
820 is the top.
top left : 10 820 moveto.

So it seems possible to understand it.


			https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF
		


This will place at x=10 and 700 (almost on top of page)
20 is size of palatino.
/Palatino 20 selectfont
10 700 moveto
(This will show several lines. S20 )
show

show makes it appears on page
showpage "print" or display the page.

How to calculate the points between each lines ? 
How to find out the character point size?

Thinking about C.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> to convert a Tex (basics \section(),...) to PS format.



No, the idea is not to make a TeX interpreter / compiler. Input is not TeX, but postscript plus some GUI actions to generate further editable postscript.

BTW: what you wrote above is not TeX, but something like LaTeX.

And you do not need PS2PDF for viewing or printing: postscript is enough.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> No, the idea is not to make a TeX interpreter / compiler. Input is not TeX, but postscript plus some GUI actions to generate further editable postscript.
> 
> BTW: what you wrote above is not TeX, but something like LaTeX.
> 
> And you do not need PS2PDF for viewing or printing: postscript is enough.



We maybe would like terminal 

Markup:
text text
text
text.

C:
So it is easy to make hello world.
fopen(  )
fgetc( )
detect linefeed or a given marker

PS:
int posx = 10; int posy = 820;    //top left
position the cursor (PS) to 10 820 with moveto, and just bring on ( text text tex ) with '(' and ')' what the markup text document returns,
treat each char after another one:
if   posx is greater than 800, add a linefeed, => posy -= size_pt ;


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> We maybe would like terminal



Well, with TeX one writes on terminal with any text editor text that is to be seen on GUI. You cannot mess, you must give numbers (coordinates), you have no help from the computer to get the numbers (eg click here and see the numbers). To do a more or less trivial page layout with TeX is a lot of work.

Of course you can draw giving postscript commands, but the idea is to help the process of creating these commands with a GUI. You will in any case need a GUI or a printer to see the result.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

here a cool alternative to TeX:


```
%!PS

/Courier 10 selectfont
10 10 moveto
(HERE)
show

1 1 moveto
(-)
show

588 835 moveto
(-)
show

588 835 moveto
(|)
show

588 1 moveto
(|)
show

588 1 moveto
(-)
show

1 835 moveto
(-)
show
1 835 moveto
(|)
show
1 825 moveto
(L)
show



/Courier-Bold 10 selectfont

100 730 moveto
(1. Introduction Section)
show

/Courier 10 selectfont
100 710 moveto
(Location: X:100 Y:710)
show

100 700 moveto
(Hello This is the first line)
show

100 690 moveto
(Hello This is the 2. line)
show

100 680 moveto
(Hello This is the 2. line)
show

/Courier 10 selectfont
100 670 moveto
( )
show

/Courier-Bold 10 selectfont
100 660 moveto
(2. Second Section)
show

/Courier 10 selectfont
100 650 moveto
()
show

/Courier 10 selectfont
100 640 moveto
(Text Text Tex)
show


/Courier 10 selectfont
100 630 moveto
(Text Text Tex)
show

showpage
```

edit with nedit and create:   test.ps

ps2pdf test.ps

mupdf test.pdf

0 0 to 588 835.
Ymax = 835 (top right of page)
Xmax = 588 (top right)

bottom left is 0 0

It goes upward !

10 is line space (10 pts).

Font Space:
Courier 10
In X direction: +6 will be the addtional space necessary
+ 10 is ok for Y direction.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> here a cool alternative to TeX:



Well, one must be very desesperated in order that this be an alternative to TeX. 

But as you see, the "primitives" are just in postscript, it is not necessary to program them as in TeX and Metafont, but some construct above it is necessary. I would say, one can begin doing a prototype with Tcl/Tk, of course with C extensions, for example for text parsing.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Well, one must be very desesperated in order that this be an alternative to TeX.
> 
> But as you see, the "primitives" are just in postscript, it is not necessary to program them as in TeX and Metafont, but some construct above it is necessary. I would say, one can begin doing a prototype with Tcl/Tk, of course with C extensions, for example for text parsing.



Just plain C is fair enough for a primitive first code.

Actually, the rendering of PS is awesome. Knuth got nice rendering because the fonts are already impressive. Courier looks strange, but palatino seems to be already implemented.

So, with nothing, it looks already very beautiful...

I just printed the output of the file.
It is actually kinda easier to make it in PS rather than TEX.

Are you ready to see the resulting C code (clang compilable)?

Let's call it :  supertex.c ?


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Are you ready to see the resulting C code (clang compilable)?



I would propose to think about what the program must exactly do be before programming.

I have but a lot of work!!!

Knuth text looks better because he did care a lot on aesthetics. Just read in his TeXBook and his MFBook about it, their TeX-sources are in the TeX source, but perhaps you find them as PDF/dvi in the net (tricky to compile them). TeX and Metafont are real typesetting programs.

Perhaps an excersise: a C program that translates a mathematical formula written as in TeX to postscript.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

Done for a first approach !!


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

Perhaps you can use Knuths algorithms, translate some to C. Knuth would be perhaps very happy if you read, learn and experiment with his code. Just read about the license:





__





						TeX - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

You can give a try.

There is a makefile.









						GitHub - spartrekus/stex: lightweight markup for creating PS documents (later PDF)
					

lightweight markup for creating PS documents (later PDF) - GitHub - spartrekus/stex: lightweight markup for creating PS documents (later PDF)




					github.com
				




Here it is - about less than 100 lines for making a first prototype.
It does only Y direction so far.

I want C because I can compile it on any kind of hardware (solaris, amiga, commodore, bsd,....).


----------



## shkhln (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Perhaps you can use Knuths algorithms, translate some to C.



Are you trying to outdo Spartrekus at his own game? Any person capable of uploading almost 600 GitHub repos without touching git is not a person to be f###### with.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 8, 2019)

shkhln said:


> Are you trying to outdo Spartrekus at his own game? Any person capable of uploading almost 600 GitHub repos without using git is not a person to be f###### with.



I do not need to install _git_.  How much disk space will it require to install _git_ ?
_Github_ is anyhow in the hands of Microsoft.
// _Subversion_ is a good alternative.

Note:
This is only for scientific interests - research in digital programming maybe.

So,... *first prototype: 
mission accomplished* *hruodr *according to your ideas.
X will be done later.... just Y for first test.
What to do next with this PS format?

A dummy text document was converted to PS and later to PDF.
In order to convert this document, only any kind of C compiler can be used to make _stex_.
_stex_ will process the text document and it will create the PS document.
I tested, and this PS document is printed with just :  lpr

lpr -PPRIINTER  -o fit-to-page -o media=A4              "dummy.ps"


----------



## hruodr (Feb 8, 2019)

shkhln said:


> Are you trying to outdo @Spartrekus at his own game?



*Spartrekus* learns by doing, by trial and err, not by first studying. If he get things uploaded and reachs his only goal in the matter: what is the problem of uploading in the "false" way?

He does not read first the whole description of postscript, but begin doing examples. It is his way.

But yes, I was trying to show him other approach: to first study. To read what Knuth wrote and was written to be read by people learning. To first build a concept and then program.

But in any case: his approach of learning is not absolutely false and my approach, as also may be yours, not absolutely correct. A good balanced mixture is a better approach.


----------



## shkhln (Feb 8, 2019)

hruodr said:


> what is the problem of uploading in the "false" way?



Nothing really, it's just that uploading files via browser ui is the most cumbersome and labor intensive method available, which makes 600 repos achievement more impressive. I feel successfully trolled even thinking about it.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 9, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Here it is - about less than 100 lines for making a first prototype.



Too much lines. With tcl would be perhaps 3 lines. And TeX does much more: align lines, breaks on the right place, adds "glue" to make length of lines flexible. Just see in TexBook what it does. Also the input of formulae.

Just try to write a function `char *fortran(char *frm)` that takes a formula like in TeX input and gives postscript code.


----------



## ralphbsz (Feb 9, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Did he write it with fp (fp-ide) turbo pascal originally?


That is a completely ridiculous notion.  Sorry, but Don Knuth does not use turbo pascal.  Don uses real computers.  Turbo Pascal runs on crappy toys.

The first version of TeX was written in SAIL, the famous language used by the DEC-10 (a mainframe made by Digital Equipment in the 60s and 70s).  The language was designed for implementing artificial intelligence applications at Stanford (thence the name).  The next version was written in "literate programming": The source code is written in a language called Web (it has nothing to do with the world-wide web, and predated it by about 20 years).  You can take the Web source code and run it through either of two programs, one called "tangle", the other called "weave":

The output of one of them is TeX code, which you can run through TeX, and it produces the full documentation for the source code.  The documentation is so beautiful and clear, it reads like a book.  Matter-of-fact, the source code was published in book form (I think it is roughly half a dozen volumes for TeX and MetaFont).
The output of the other program is Pascal source code (in a strange dialect of Pascal which is specific to Knuth), and which you can compile into the TeX executable.  Since the original Pascal compiler for the DEC-10 doesn't exist any longer, it is today typically converted into C code.
The other thing one has to remember that TeX is really not a document description language.  It is actually a full programming language.  Don Knuth is not a programmer, he is a computer scientist (and one of the greatest ones).  You can actually implement a BASIC interpreter in TeX if you want (it's been done).  The thing about TeX is: while it is a full programming language, it happens to be designed to produce DVI output as a side effect, so it happens to be most useful (and most easy to use) to write documents.

TeX itself is amazingly stable; it has had very few changes in the last dozen years or so.  Its version number is asymptotically approaching pi.

In practice, raw TeX is an somewhat inefficient way to write documents.  That's why people use LaTeX instead.  LaTeX is implemented in TeX (it is nothing but a macro package for TeX).  The huge difference is that TeX is a typesetting language: intellectually it thinks about "put this glyph here on the page", or "lay out the characters on this line while keeping sentences together but have nice line breacks".  In contrast, LaTeX is a markup language (like SGML and HTML): intellectually it thinks about "this is a heading, and this is the caption under a figure".  For large documents, LaTeX is much easier to use.  Because LaTeX is nothing but a macro package for TeX, you have the whole power of TeX available, in addition to the document structuring mechanisms.  LaTeX is the product of another computer science genius, Leslie Lamport (of Paxos fame).  Obviously, Don and Leslie are friends, and live close to each other (Don is a professor at Stanford in Palo Alto, and Leslie worked for a long time a Digital Research in Palo Alto, and I think he now works at Microsoft in Mountain View or Sunnyvale).

To a large extent, TeX (and LaTeX) have nothing to do with postscript and PDF.  They generate DVI output, which is device independent (thence the name).  That output is then merged with fonts (which are often created by Knuth's program MetaFont, although people often use inferior Postscript fonts), to create device-specific output.  The DVI format is relatively simple, and a DVI driver can be pretty short.  I happen to know that the DVI driver for an early laser printer was written in 6 or 7 lines of APL ... but the lines were about 300 characters long (and APL source code is amazingly dense and bizarre, de-facto unreadable).  I started using TeX in about 1982 (on an IBM mainframe, where for previewing we used Tektronix 4014 graphics terminals, and we had a wet toner-based electrostatic Versatec plotter for output).  Today, most output from TeX goes into postscript or PDF format, but the original dvips driver (written by my former colleague Tom Rokicki from HP Labs) is small and efficient, and I'm sure you can find the source code for it on the web.

I'm sure a minimal TeX / LaTeX / MetaFond / dvips distribution could be built from original sources, and stored in a very small amount of space (dozens or hundreds of megabytes, mostly for the fonts).  It would be an interesting exercise in retrocomputing.  Would probably take a real expert a week or two to do; configuring and setting it up is famously difficult.  Generating the fonts with mf takes considerable CPU time (we used to run the font generation overnight, when computers were still measured in single-digit MIPS).

Little personal story: One time I was at a meeting, sitting next to Leslie Lamport.  He was crying.  Don Knuth was also there, and he was also crying.  So was I.  Matter-of-fact, everyone in the room was crying.  It was the memorial service for a colleague of ours, and the widow of our colleague was giving the eulogy on stage (she is a well-known computer science prof at Harvard herself).  Very sad.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 9, 2019)

ralphbsz said:


> Don Knuth is not a programmer, he is a computer scientist (and one of the greatest ones).



No, no, no!!!! He is a mathematician.


----------



## olli@ (Feb 9, 2019)

hruodr said:


> No, no, no!!!! He is a mathematician.


Please excuse me for being blunt, but that's a completely clueless statement. It's not even funny.

I have Knuth's famous TAOCP volumes on my book shelf right beside me, and I use them a lot. I invite you to look up TAOCP on Wikipedia. Maybe even go to a library and look at the books yourself, and read one of the chapters. I'm pretty sure that you won't deny anymore that Knuth is a computer scientist. (Of course, _every_ computer scientist is also a mathematician to some degree, but that doesn't change the point.)


----------



## hruodr (Feb 9, 2019)

olli@ said:


> I invite you to look up TAOCP on Wikipedia.



Do you really think that I do not know Knuths "The Art of Computing Programming"? If you read it carefully, you note that Knuth is not a computer scientist, but a mathematician.

Well, you can say he is a computer scientist due to the way he computes the splines in Metafont using formula 10 of the Article linked below. I am sure that the splines may be calculated much better, but I suppose that was a compromise to have a working TeX implementation faster and not because he was playing computer scientist.

Article: http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1047/CS-TR-85-1047.pdf


----------



## rigoletto@ (Feb 9, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Miktex runs on about 150 mb



I have MiKTex installed (also SEE) with less than a third of that and you can still make it smaller if you really want to, its all depends on how you build it.
MiKTex bring many builtin UI (Qt5) stuff (like Texworks, a console UI, etc.) you can disable at build time.


----------



## olli@ (Feb 9, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Do you really think that I do not know Knuths "The Art of Computing Programming"? If you read it carefully, you note that Knuth is not a computer scientist, but a mathematician.


Actually he is _both_ (read his CV), but the field he works in and he is most famous for is computer science. TAOCP is about computer science, TeX and MF are works of computer science. Of course, all of that requires some mathematical background, too, but that's actually typical of computer science. You can hardly do computer science without mathematics.

Note that many famous computer scientists are also mathematicians. Historically, the field of computer science was branched from mathematics (at the beginning, computer science was barely more than a variant of applied mathematics). When I started studying computer science, the first four semesters had the same lectures as my fellow students who studied mathematics.


----------



## ralphbsz (Feb 10, 2019)

hruodr said:


> No, no, no!!!! He is a mathematician.


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).


----------



## hruodr (Feb 10, 2019)

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).



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.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 11, 2019)

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.



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.


----------



## olli@ (Feb 11, 2019)

hruodr said:


> This dominant position of TeXLive may mean at the end TeX death.


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 %.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 11, 2019)

olli@ said:


> Also, I don't understand your problem with kpathsea. It's a library that made life a lot easier.



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.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 11, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Tom Rokicki writes in http://www.radicaleye.com the follwing:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



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".


----------



## olli@ (Feb 11, 2019)

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.


That's a _gross_ underestimation of the complexity of a TeX system. Apparently you haven't been using TeX for very long.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 12, 2019)

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 ?


----------



## ralphbsz (Feb 13, 2019)

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.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 13, 2019)

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).



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

web.tex


			https://github.com/spartrekus/plaintex-examples/blob/master/tex.web
		


It would be rather interesting to look at files, which allows TeX compilation (including results size as well) in details.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 13, 2019)

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.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 13, 2019)

The postscript interpreter needs probably more resources than TeX. TeX is also necessary, because it is like a standard.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 13, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> If anyone has time, please have fun converting the original code to something "lighter".



You can begin.

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









						C/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
				




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.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 13, 2019)

hruodr said:


> You can begin.
> 
> `xdvi` exsists without kpathsea and compiles in FreeBSD with two little fixes. Se here:
> 
> ...



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


----------



## hruodr (Feb 13, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Why not to rewrite TeX completely from scratch



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.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 14, 2019)

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.



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.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 14, 2019)

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 ....


----------



## olli@ (Feb 14, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> Which packages (pkg) holds _pdflatex_ binary?


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`.


----------



## hruodr (Feb 14, 2019)

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.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 14, 2019)

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.



How did you manage to get your "own" version? I want it too


----------



## hruodr (Feb 15, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> How did you manage to get your "own" version? I want it too



`tex -ini yourformat.tex`, then `\dump` and quit with `^D`.

Place `yourformat.fmt` in your local `texmf/web2c/tex/` and call it with `yourformat` linked to `tex`.

Just do `man tex`.


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 16, 2019)

Is there so far a solution to install less than 1.5 GB for only pdftex and pdflatex?


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 16, 2019)

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 !










						Explaining BSD
					

Brief explanation about BSD




					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
				





			Life in UNIX® V7: an attempt at a simple task | Virtually Fun


----------



## Spartrekus (Feb 17, 2019)

Valuable lectures / Stanford:









						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


----------



## olli@ (Feb 17, 2019)

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?


“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:

```
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).


GNU is not Linux. You are allowing your hatred of Linux to cloud your mind.


----------



## ralphbsz (Feb 17, 2019)

Olli: I completely agree with the overall gist of your message.  Just one detail:



olli@ said:


> Well, if you want to use a type setting system, you're going to need fonts.


True.  But you can run (La-) TeX without using any MF (MetaFont) fonts.  Instead you can use Postscript fonts exclusively.  To do that, you need the font metric files (the .tfm) files for Postscript fonts, but those are (a) available, and (b) included in one of the smaller packages above.  This requires using the correct setup files in your document, but then you can delete the texmf package.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when dvips was already fully formed, but Postscript laser printers had really slow rendering engines and little memory, we used to do that, and print documents using only PS fonts.  Why?  For a printer to render a page with native Postscript fonts (which are stored inside the printer, in optimized form) is pretty fast.  But when using MF fonts, it takes a long time to send the large font bitmap files in the various sizes to the printer over slow links (I still have a LaserJet 5MP at home, which uses a parallel port, at probably less than 100KB/second), and then it takes a long time for the tiny little CPU in the printer to put all the bitmap characters on the page.

One can argue whether using PS or MF fonts gives better quality output.  Personally, I like the MetaFont "computer modern" serifed fonts better than the standard Times Roman fonts that one gets commonly in Postscript.  For scientific papers (which I still read and write), it seems to be the only thing that looks right.  The MF math symbols are leagues better than anything else, since they were designed by a person who had spent decades reading and writing papers full of mathematical symbols.  But when it comes to sans-serif fonts, MetaFont just doesn't look right; there the standard has been set by the the Selectric's Gothic font, and by Helvetica.



> You are allowing your hatred of Linux to cloud your mind.


This is a common problem, particularly here on the forum.  There are unfortunately a lot of people here who are motivated by emotion (hating Windows, hating Linux, ...) or unreflected dogma (only open source is good, only the BSD license is good, ...).  Those people too frequently then take their beliefs and create fake technical arguments from that, by being selective in their cognition: "my windows machine crashed twice last year, therefore Microsoft is an evil company that creates low-quality software just to suck our blood out, but we knew that beforehand".  There is a lot of confirmation bias.


----------

