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A comment on Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk. Parent comment

Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by inglor_cz on Saturday August 20, 2022 @04:10PM (#32534829)
Pardon me, but why have modern binaries grown so big? When I wrote my thesis in TeX, the entire installation would fit in some 30 megabytes or so. It was actually right in the uncomfortable middle. Far too big to carry around on a set of diskettes, but a CD would be waste of space.
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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by mlyle on Saturday August 20, 2022 @04:24PM (#32534912)
You can fit a decent TeX distribution in <100MB.

But if you want to have every macro package that everyone everywhere likes, you're going to use some space.

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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by Turing_Machine on Saturday August 20, 2022 @04:33PM (#32534968)
I've often wondered why there isn't a dependency system for TeX that lets you get only the packages you need... feed it a document and tell it to automatically download and install any missing packages.

There may be some technical reason why this isn't practical. Anyone know, offhand?

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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by kccqzy on Saturday August 20, 2022 @04:43PM (#32535019)
Totally practical and supported. See MikTeX: https://miktex.org/kb/just-enough-tex

But the reason I don't use it is because I don't always have Internet when I need to write my document. I'd rather download all the packages and their documentation beforehand.

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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by bombcar on Saturday August 20, 2022 @08:24PM (#32536310)
When stuck on a plane without wifi the only thing I could find on my computer to read were the Tex manuals. Good stuff.
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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by rdlw on Saturday August 20, 2022 @05:53PM (#32535465)
MikTeX also supports downloading individual packages, though I wish there was an option to download, say, the most commonly used 1GB or something.
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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by mickmcq on Saturday August 20, 2022 @06:18PM (#32535647)
There is a TeX distribution that does what you say, TinyTeX. For some reason it is obscure and only really used by R and R Studio users. That may be because it is used to render R Markdown documents to pdf.
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