[pdftex] Why was TIF support removed?

[Robin Fairbairns]

Jeffrey McArthur 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.

and now you give them a copy of texlive?  (they can execute from that,
just as well as from your old floppy.  the latest distribution doesn't
need pk files at all.)

> 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.

i think the suggestion was "a few megabytes on the executable", and as
you've already said, the disc size is negligible in most real
situations (apart from making texlive a more complicated object to
construct).  where those megabytes do bother us is in execution: a
practical tex run seems to get bigger all the time -- what i thought
of as "hugelatex" (with tetex 1.0) is now the default size with tetex
2.0.  now, i do have 8 times as much memory on my computer as i had on
the old machine, and the disc channels are faster, but all this
heaving things to and fro is what bothers us all.

> 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.  

i don't quite understand what you're suggesting here.  removing the
.dtx files from the distribution is fine (users in my place don't have
them installed on their machines), but that doesn't sound quite what
you're suggesting.  you do know that most modern dtx files are
compilable in their own right to produce the package documentation, as
well as being strippable to produce the package itself?