TeX Live: texlive +medium vs. BasicTex

Dan Ports dports at macports.org
Thu Mar 1 17:19:53 PST 2012


On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 04:05:22PM -0800, Art McGee wrote:
> Not sure if this is an approriate question for this list or -users,
> but does anyone know how the texlive metaport with the default +medium
> variant compares to the BasicTex package, which is a subset of the
> full Tex Live:

As I understand it, BasicTeX corresponds roughly to the combination of
 - texlive-basic
 - texlive-latex
 - texlive-latex-recommended
 - texlive-luatex
 - texlive-metapost
 - texlive-xetex
It also includes a couple additional packages (synctex, revtex, times,
lm, and hyphenation patterns for various European languages)

So that means our default texlive +medium is a superset of BasicTeX
(with one exception, revtex, which is in texlive-publishers). It also
includes more fonts (texlive-fonts-recommended), additional utilities
(texlive-bin-extra), English documentation, math packages, and some
other packages for common European languages.

You can install any combination of the texlive ports you want; a
helpful reference as to what's actually in them is at
https://trac.macports.org/wiki/TeXLivePackages

If you're interested in a small install, it's also worth noting that
you can install these ports with the -doc variant to omit the
documentation. Of course, the documentation is useful and nice to have
around, but it can be pretty large -- for example, texlive-latex-extra
is about 5 MB of TeX files with 250 MB of documentation.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports              MIT CSAIL                http://drkp.net/


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