[tex-live] scheme modern

Robin Fairbairns Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk
Thu Jan 6 21:34:15 CET 2011


Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 08:06:34PM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> > On 6 January 2011 Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> > 
> >  > TikZ is very complex package. Beginners will hardly be able to use
> >  > it.  Users who are able to use TikZ will probably need a lot of
> >  > other packages.
> > 
> > TikZ is used by pgfplots.  And I know beginners who use it *because*
> > it's easy to use.  If you don't point them to pgfplots, they use Excel
> > instead and then ask you how to get this stuff into their LaTeX files.
> > Good luck!
> >  
> >  > I have scheme-full installed. The size of the whole texmf-dist is
> >  > 2.4 GB while the size of texmf-dist/tex containing the packages is
> >  > only 172 MB, ie about 7% of total size. If you do not remove the
> >  > largest packages as TikZ and fonts, you hardly save any space. If
> >  > you do not want to remove TeX Gyre, you can probably remove support
> >  > for Arabic and Asian languages, it may save some good space.
> > 
> > But many people use XeTeX/LuaTeX in order to typeset Arabic and Asian
> > scripts. :)
> 
> There is no usable (for modern engines) Arabic fonts in texlive AFAIK,
> so Arabic users are not losing that much (Also Arabic fonts tend to be
> small, < 100kb each). I doubt there is much usable CJK font either.

do such (free) fonts exist?  if so, why not get them on ctan so they
_will_ appear in texlive in due course?

it seems to me that we've quite a lot of "bits" of tex work for using
middle eastern and north african languages, but nothing to draw them
together.  it would be really pleasing if a focus could emerge, on
putting the pieces together for such potential users.

however, what you say is (sadly) true just now


More information about the tex-live mailing list