[pdftex] Why was TIF support removed?

[Jeffrey McArthur]

On Sun, 13 Jul 2003 21:58:31 +0200, you wrote:

I still have a copy of what I called "Tiny TeX".  It was a copy of the old
EmTeX that ran on the 8086 (small memory model).  You could fit TeX, the CM
fonts, and a DVI Previewer all on a 1.44 Meg floppy, with no compression.  I
used to hand that out to people who wanted to transfer into my department.

But a the "standard TeX distribution" contains all of the LaTeX stuff.  A
few more bytes on the TeX executable is insignificant compared to all of
that.

One suggestion I have made before on cutting down the distribution size is
to get rid of all the DocStrip files.  With the performance of systems
today, there is no reason not to just run from files with all the comments
embedded in them.  That would cut down the distribution size of a full LaTeX
implementation by at least 25%.  Also it would cut the total number of files
in about half.  

>At 10:04 13/07/2003 -0400, Jeffrey McArthur wrote:
>>On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 19:22:02 +0200, you wrote:
>>
>>That reminds me of the argument about CALS tables in SGML.  Nothing
>>completely supported CALS tables. I created a simple little example where
>>the rows and columns came in from right to left, bottom to top.  Nothing
>>could read it. Though that was suppored by the standard.  The same is true
>>with TIFF.  The standard is very complicated.
>>
>>I guess I have another question.  Why was the size of the binaries
>>important? Does it really matter with todays disk size?
>
>it depends, on older win95/98 machines it may make a difference; also, in 
>order to squeeze things in a cd (tex live) the smaller the files, the 
>better; it becomes less important, but it is interesting in itself that 
>pure tex is quite small
>
>Hans
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    Jeffrey M\kern-.05em\raise.5ex\hbox{\b c}\kern-.05emArthur
    a.k.a. Jeffrey McArthur          ATLIS Publishing Services