On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:38 AM, C Y <[email protected]> wrote: > I have compiled xetex from the latest Git sources on sourceforge, and the > build appears to have been successful. > > Does the sourceforge Git repo of xetex produce a working (albeit minimal) > TeX once compilation is complete? (It didn't seem to in my quick test, but > it's quite possible I didn't do something right environment wise...) If > not, is there documentation anywhere of what constitutes the minimal set of > files that will allow an average LaTeX document to be typeset? > > My interest is in building a "Minimalist" subset of TeX in situations where > a system installation isn't present, but I've not had much luck locating > documentation describing what constitutes a minimal-yet-functional subset of > the TeX Live distribution. Has anybody documented such a subset?
There have been various attempts in the past, but to succeed you need pretty tight control over the documents (macro packages and fonts required). If done this a few times for "production" systems that needed to format a known set of documents. I just used the TL installer and selected the only the few packages I knew I needed, then added the few more that were required. Occasionally someone makes a change and I have to add another package, and I'm sure there is stuff that is never used. There is some overhead to using the TL package manager, but that is outweighed by the advantage of being able to easily make updates/additions. It is not so easy to discover that some previously required package is no longer being used. -- George N. White III <[email protected]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
