TeX Live, Tiny TeX, AWS Lambda and reworking TeX for modern times

[Jonathan Fine]

Note:  This is a spin off from a message sent by Norbert to texhax, which
I'm responding to on tex-live.
https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2021-January/024797.html

Hi Norbert

Summary: Thank you for your interest in a reworked TeX for modern times.
Here are some good ideas (from Yihui Xie and Sam O'Connor) that I'd like
the TeX Live team to develop further.

You wrote that you're eager to hear my proposal for a reworked TeX for
modern times.

Here's an example, but it's not my work. It's TinyTeX. It's author Yihui
Xie writes that it is a lightweight, cross-platform, portable, and
easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live. In particular, it
works well for R users.

Here's the URLs for the project webpage, the CRAN entry, and The R Journal
(which is typeset using TeX). And also from the author's 2019 TUGBoat
article on TinyTeX.

https://yihui.org/tinytex/
https://yihui.org/tinytex/#motivation
https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/tinytex/index.html
https://journal.r-project.org/

The author of TinyTeX thanked the TeX Live team for their work,
particularly offering options to remove source code and documentation from
the installation. Also, the author wrote an article on TinyTex for the 2019
TUGBoat.
https://yihui.org/tinytex/#acknowledgements
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb40-1/tb124xie-tinytex.pdf

My view is that TinyTeX has been a great enabler for the authors and
editors of The R Journal. I suggest that other journals and communities
would benefit from TinyTeX or something similar where "you install [only
the] LaTeX packages you actually need".

Related to this is Sam O'Connor's tex-live announcement: TeX Live on AWS
Lambda.
https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2018-March/041304.html

I've posted this to the tex-live list, as being more relevant than
texhax and tug-members. Finally, you're welcome to come to my TeX Office
hour tomorrow (Thursday) on zoom, and appreciate that my preferred hour is
awkward in your time zone.

But I'd like to give Sam and Yihui a chance to read and respond to this
message first. I'll contact them off-list about this. And perhaps we could
establish a more convenient time zone.

with best regards

Jonathan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20210106/1fe74e60/attachment.html>