9 ms·

I became aware of this while watching Professor Brailsford's interview with him (Computerphile channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNyQxXw_oMQ https://www

• dredmorbius 4y ago
  I just wanted to say: that's an excellent interview and I strongly recommend others listen to it.
• ChrisRR 4y ago
  > He says he wanted to try "XeTeX" (which supports Unicode) but "...I was going to download it as an experiment and they wanted 5 gigabytes and 5 gigabytes at the particular boonies place I'm living would...mmm..not be finished yet!" I'm struggling to understand this sentence. Who are they? What's a boonie? What's not finished?
  • detaro 4y ago
    "in the boonies" = "in the wilderness/far away from everything/...". I.e. they probably have only crappy mobile internet and don't want to download large packages.
• mlyle 4y ago
  > He says he wanted to try "XeTeX" (which supports Unicode) but "...I was going to download it as an experiment and they wanted 5 gigabytes and 5 gigabytes at the particular boonies place I'm living would...mmm..not be finished yet!" Man, I think once you're Kernighan there should be like a 1gigabit/sec symmetric circuit wherever you go just in case you use it to do something else useful.
  • asddubs 4y ago
    on the other hand, I've done lots of excellent coding in places with awful internet. fast enough to be able to look things up when you really have to, but too annoying to meaningfully distract yourself
  • sargstuff 4y ago
    Ah, thought goto usage was considered harmful.
  • scoot 4y ago
    THis isn't about bandwidth, it's about the size of modern binaries.
    • inglor_cz 4y ago
      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.
      • mlyle 4y ago
        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.
        • Turing_Machine 4y ago
          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?
          • kccqzy 4y ago
• jfk13 4y ago
  Sounds like he was looking at downloading a complete TeX Live distribution; XeTeX itself isn't anything like that size (by a couple orders of magnitude, at least).
  • ducktective 4y ago
    I think distros package it like TeX-full, TeX-minimal etc...The one having documentation files is a couple of GiB on Ubuntu... I wonder what distro or editor he is using...
    • naves 4y ago
      Two years ago, he used macOS on a 13" MacBook Air and an iMac, as per his conversation with Lex Fridman: https://youtu.be/O9upVbGSBFo?t=2523 https://youtu.be/O9upVbGSBFo?t=2523
  • zimpenfish 4y ago
    MacTeX is 4.7GB which matches the 5GB he's talking about and... "MacTeX installs TeX Live, which contains TeX, LaTeX, AMS-TeX, and virtually every TeX-related style file and font. [...] MacTeX also installs the GUI programs TeXShop, LaTeXiT, TeX Live Utility, and BibDesk. MacTeX installs Ghostscript, an open source version of Postscript." Which is, as you say, considerably more than just "XeTeX". (Also those are universal binaries containing both Intel and ARM versions which probably adds some heft.)
    • JadeNB 4y ago
      > (Also those are universal binaries containing both Intel and ARM versions which probably adds some heft.) Heh, I remember when "universal binaries" meant "PowerPC and Intel". Different universes ….
      • jhbadger 4y ago
        In the early/mid 1990s there were even "fat binaries" that had 68000 (the original Mac platform) and PowerPC binaries back when PowerPC was the new thing.
• samatman 4y ago
  > the absolute state of the tooling of the modern world Hah, TeX Live is... not that. It's been enormous since I installed it off a CD in the 90s. The idea, and it works, is that you can just compile anyone's stuff out of the TeX ecosystem. There is just... a lot... in it. You don't need a package manager if you install the whole universe locally. Like I said: not what I would call a modern approach to tooling. On the other hand, I have latex files from the mid-Noughties and, I don't even need to check: they'll compile if I want them to. But yeah, if you want just a little piece of TeX here and there, you're off the beaten track. That's not how TUG rolls.
  • rdlw 4y ago
    TeX Live can also be configured to install the bare minimum TeX ecosystem (or just TeX+LaTeX), which only takes a few minutes to download and install but results in hunting down dependencies and manually installing them whenever you want to use a new package. It also seems quite slow to update, and a recent (?) name change of `tools' to `latex-tools' seems to have broken multicol, which drove me to MikTeX. Internet connection required, but far less headache.
  • rob74 4y ago
    Old approach: "we don't have a lot of disk space, we have to be careful what we install". More modern approach: "hey, we have a lot of disk space, we can install everything locally". Even more modern approach: "hey, we have fast Internet access, we only have to install stuff when we need it".
    • mistrial9 4y ago
      all three of those ways are important today; modern is overrated
• stjohnswarts 4y ago
  He could master it in a week if he set his head to it. I don't have one doubt of that. He just doesn't really need to.
• maxnoe 4y ago
  The Problem is that TeXLive still defaults to doing a full install. A full install means installing ~4000 packages, including their source files (tens of thousands of tex files) and built documentation (thousands of PDF files) and hundreds of free fonts (otfs, ttfs, texs own format). This is huge (>7GB, not just the 5 GB claimed here). However, you don't need 99 % of this for any given document. Not installing the source files and documentation PDFs will alone reduce the size by roughly half. Only installing the packages you really need from a minimal installation gives you a few hundred megabytes at most for even complex documents. It's a bit annoying to get the list of packages needed though, since there is not really any working dependency management. I wrote a python wrapper around the tex live installer [1] to make this easy for CI jobs, see e.g. [2]. On a side note: I'd recommend luatex over xetex. - [1] https://github.com/maxnoe/texlive-batch-installation/ https://github.com/maxnoe/texlive-batch-installation/ - [2] https://github.com/pep-dortmund/toolbox-workshop/blob/8b00f030ae4c15294df9f9f9357c6078a70e520b/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L25 https://github.com/pep-dortmund/toolbox-workshop/blob/8b00f0...
  • woile 4y ago
    I can't believe I read this comment literally 10 minutes after installing endless GBs of xetex haha. Thanks for the info!
  • jcelerier 4y ago
    On archlinux there's the texlive-core package which does not ship the PDF docs (most of the size). It should install 500mb (most of which are fonts..) and already provide enough to build normal documents, including lualatex for unicode support
  • JadeNB 4y ago
    TeXLive also comes with installation schemes that will give you (if I remember the names correctly) bare, medium, and full installations, if you prefer not to pick packages yourself. Alternately, although I don't use it myself, I'm sure you could use MikTeX, which is much better about on-demand package installation. (Or even Overleaf, if you don't want to put anything on your local device!)
  • 4y ago
• cfiggers 4y ago
  Watching this interview inspired me to start playing around with groff. It has a very steep learning curve... And being as old/niche as it is, I've found it very hard to find any active community to get newbie questions answered. If anybody knows where I could find that sort of thing, I'd be very grateful.
  • neutrono 4y ago
    NB: I'm new to HN, so please excuse any formatting errors in this comment. Well, I've been using groff on and off for a few years, I can give it a shot. Most "macros" as in TeX, are invoked by having the first character of a line be a `.` and then as in TeX, refer to a name. Now, macros in groff are weird. Macros are not delimited by `{}` delimiters as in TeX, but either by having an environment block like so: .TS .TE Incidentally, `.TS` and `.TE` is the environment for tbl(1), the pre-processor for tables. Or by invoking another macro, as in this example for headings and paragraphs in the -ms macro set. (The -ms macro set is called as such because that's how you get it into your document, you supply the -ms flag at build time to groff to get the -ms macros). See groff_ms(7) for more information than I will supply here. .NH 1 Some heading here .PP Start of a paragraph. Sometimes you want to start a line of input with a period. To do that you just use the character '\&' before the period. The `\&` character is a non printing character, so use it anywhere you want, really. I imagine you want to play with math typography, in that case there is EQN. EQN works by having an environment block, `.EQ` and `.EN` and in that block you type in the EQN mini-language. .EQ f ( x ) ~=~ x sup {2} - 1 .EN EQN does not care about precedence or anything, so use `{}` to delimit expressions. I think there is some kind of EQN document rescued from Bell Labs that tells you about how the language works. Check troff.org for it, or email the mailing list for groff, which is also pretty good for newbie questions, it is not really all that high traffic. Groff also does pictures, so you can for example create a box with some text in it (it is capable of more, like strokes, macros, color, and I believe rotation[not sure]). To start a picture, `.PS` and `.PE` will do so, and again, a small language as input in that block. Now, to print anything you should know the design of the original troff system was heavily based on the UNIX philosophy, which means the output you get from running the groff program prints the output to stdout. Just redirect the output to a file to get a PDF or a PS document. Obviously, there is much I have not covered in this comment, such as macros, registers, and other exciting topics such as refer(1), but this should give you a quick start.
• lr1970 4y ago
  > He says he wanted to try "XeTeX" (which supports Unicode) but "...I was going to download it as an experiment and they wanted 5 gigabytes and 5 gigabytes at the particular boonies place I'm living would...mmm..not be finished yet!" He can try "Tectonic" [0] - a modern XeTeX based TeX/LaTeX distribution that installs a minimum system and then downloads and installs dependencies on-demand. Tectonic is written in C and Rust [1]. [0] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ [1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic
  • xvilka 4y ago
    It's sad that Tectonic conversion to Rust[1] was never finished. For now it's just a wrapper around C and C++ code. By far, it was the most promising thing in this distribution. [1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459
• amyjess 4y ago
  It's not just the tooling of the modern world. I remember installing teTeX (the predecessor of TeX Live) back in 2003 and I despaired at the file size because I knew it would take days to download on the shitty dialup connection I had at the time. Yeah, it wasn't 5 GB big back then, but it was certainly big by 2003 standards.