[Tex/LaTex] Is it possible to install only the required LaTeX tool “pdflatex” in Ubuntu

installingpdftextexlive

I do not know the dependencies b/w the tools provided by the LaTeX bulky lib. A suggested command to install LaTeX tools on Ubuntu is:

sudo apt-get install texlive-full

It's full installation requires almost 1,801 MB of disk-space. What I need is only the pdflatex command line tool. Is it possible to install the required tool(s) only? If not what is the best way to install the required libs/tools?

Best Answer

Almost every distro have its own package manager. Maintainers of any distro have their own point of view onto package building: its dependencies and its contents. So, for example, in Archlinux TeXLive is split onto many small packages. In Debian and Ubuntu, I think, it must be alike.

The smallest working set of LaTeX have volume about 300 megabytes. For example, my installation of TeXLive is near 0.5GB. The only optimal way is to install texlive-core and after that - some packages you need (you will know that they aren't installed in your system by latex error messages).

For example, package texlive-bin contains all binary files, but no style files; texlive-core contains main style files and some auxiliary utils. For using bibtex with different bibliography styles, you will need texlive-bibtex-extra. texlive-langcyrillic contains support of Cyrillic languages. For using different styles to include images into your file you will need texlive-pictures. Et cetera.