[Tex/LaTex] How best to run LaTeX on a system with few resources

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I've been running LaTeX for about a decade on my Macs and I've picked up a Dell Chromebook for travelling (to install Linux via Crouton). Pretty much the only reason to do this over a tablet is that I want a proper LaTeX installation on it. The CB has only 2GB RAM and a 16 GB hard drive so I need to be careful with resources.

Question: any recommended way to keep the LaTeX size in check or otherwise optimize my setup so I can happily write and compile? This is a working computer so if I can run LaTeX smoothly, I'm happy.

I've only ever run the odd command line command so advice would be very welcome on how to install via command line (on Linux) so I get full packages (so I'm self contained for travel and minimal internet access) but without all the disk hogging documentation.

I was able to install with the command: sudo apt-get install texlive AND sudo apt-get install texlive-full but not fully certain either of these is quite what I was after. (Not sure how to verify.) I want full packages but no documentation. Suggestions?

Thanks!

Best Answer

If you install vanilla texlive via the command line (e.g. from https://www.tug.org/texlive/acquire-netinstall.html) you can de-select things like documentation and languages you don't need. At the bottom you will always see the required size for your selection:

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actually this is a further comment on corentin's answer, but it exceeds 600 characters.

Since http://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/ is an Apache directory listing you can try downloading packages with wget. For example if you want to download l3experimental where xcoffins is a subfolder you can invoke wget like

wget --cut-dir=4 -np -R "index.html*" -nH -P ~/texmf -r http://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3experimental/

wget --cut-dir=6 -np -R "index.html*" -P ~/texmf/tex/latex -r http://www.tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3experimental/

this.

-P ~/dir/in/home/directory/ specifies the local directory where wget should put your files.
-nH tells wget that you don't want to create directories named after the host i.e. ~/texmf/www.tug.org/*/*/ looks not so nice and latex won't find anything under ~/texmf/www.tug.org. But you can omit -nH and change the local directory to -P ~/textmf/tex/latex. Then you have a seperate directory tree that latex also searches.
whereby --cut-dir=x means that you don't want to create the first x folders of the uri in your local directory (you want to create ~/texmf/tex/latex/l3experimental/ or ~/texmf/tex/latex/www.tug.org/l3experimental/ instead of ~/textmf/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3experimental).
-R instructs wget to exclude all files beginning with index.html.
-r is for recursive fetch
the argument of -P is the directory where you want to save all those things
-np excludes all parent directories of l3experimental (of course you can find a more detailed description in the manual pages of wget)

but generally be careful if you download things with wget recursively it could mess up a whole directory tree. I would recommend you to first download the files in a temporary directory (for example with -P ~/texmftemporary) where you can examine the downloaded directory tree.

Since latex also searches recursively for packages in ~/texmf/tex/latex you don't have to bother if xcoffins is a subfolder of any other folder/folders.

Of course you can redefine things further if you write a little bash, perl or whatever script that is based on the above command.

Maybe this helps you!?

[Tex/LaTex] amsthm.sty package instalation problem under Linux

do you actually have \usepackage{amsthm} in your preamble?

if amsthm wasn't installed on your system, that would give you an error (a different one) much sooner.

since the error is delayed until you try to use a theorem, it sounds like you just forgot to load the package.

(a minimum non-working example would have made that sort of error obvious very quickly. had to use my crystal ball instead, and it's been a bit murky lately.)

Best Answer

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