[tex-live] Minimal TeX system?

[John R. Culleton]

On Sunday 24 eptembe 2006 04:06, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> > Can anyone point me in the right direction? It seems very hard to get
> > a working TeX without all the LaTeX stuff and a bunch of utilities.
>
> you can compile it yourself, surely?  that way you could create
> a distribution for the one or two people a year who ask for a
> plain-only distribution.  (speaking as a ctan maintainer, i can assure
> you we would be happy to serve such a distribution for you.)
>
> failing that, why not install a complete thing and delete the stuff
> you don't want?
>
> robin
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Alternatively there is a minimal Context distro available. It has
executables for pdfetex and Context (actually texexec) but not
tex, Latex or pdflatex.  For most purposes pdfetex can be used
instead of plain tex. It is essentially a superset of plain tex. 

It comes in two zip files, For my Linux system the two zips are
justtex.zip & linuxtex.zip.  You would need the macosxtex.zip
instead of the linux file. 

The two zip files total about 70 MB. Expanded they occupy about
180 MB. You could still do significant pruning as Robin suggests. 

Visit 
http://www.pragma-ade.nl/download-1.htm
for the downloads. 

The Texlive distro is much bulkier (a full cdr) but the install
script allows you to pick and choose what you want to install. 

-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexing and Typesetting
Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost.
Satisfaction guaranteed. 
http://wexfordpress.com