To be honest, when I am using LaTeX, I just want to write without any interruption. That's why I install texlive-full. Since I am (almost) guaranteed that whatever I encountered, I would be able to do it.<p>Dealing with complexity of LaTeX and CPAN is not something I really want to do, especially when I am meeting (paper submission) deadline.
For 10+ years I've been a big fan of D. Knuth's TeX with Knuth's original macros Plain. I have about 70 TeX macros of my own. That <i>setup</i> is for all my higher quality word processing from ordinary letters to mathematics, and I regard it as fine. For that word processing, that setup is fine, a done deal.<p>I looked at LaTeX, got the basic books, etc. and concluded that (A) Knuth's documentation in <i>The TeXBook</i> is relatively short, well written, and essentially totally free of bugs, and it is easy to write more macros and (B) the LaTeX documentation is much longer, less well written, for the internal logic much harder to understand, maybe with bugs if only from the length and complexity and being so big and complicated, and much more difficult for me to write more macros. So, I've just stayed with TeX and never used LaTeX except once when I downloaded a paper in LaTeX and wanted to format and read it.<p>Lesson: TeX itself, the design, documentation, functionality, and code are really quite good, and for some people LaTeX may be less good. Don't rush to give up on TeX.
TeX people are unsung heroes to me and about as close to magic as software can get.<p>It's like an ancient secret order that is keeping the world safe from word-processors.<p>I have no idea of what they do, or how they do it, but I can't argue with the world-class results.
> If you create a tarball of TinyTeX on macOS or Ubuntu, it will be only 50MB<p>This is excellent and has accelerated my long-term dream: an up-to-date TeX distribution that can live in my home directory in an lz4 (hc) squashfs archive (72M) and be mounted on an as-needed basis.<p>UPDATE: As I had hoped, TinyTeX works in an lz4 squashfs. On my system it's actually a tiny bit faster under squashfs than from my ext4 home partition.
Yihui Xie has been an incredible boon for the R & Pandoc ecosystems. Turning your R code into pdf or html is so easy I'm surprised language authors aren't scrambling to copy the feature.
It is notable that LaTeX development moved to GitHub [1] and anyone can send a pull request without much hassle.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/latex3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/latex3</a>
My favorite part about this article is the extra wide space that follows their apostrophe character. It really gives an air of legitimacy to their LaTeX distribution...
Some time ago I was trying to include more than one bibliography in a document. After a day or so trying to make it work with the MacTex installation, I checked if it would work with ShareLatex. Worked at the first try, changing nothing in my files. From then, I never looked back.<p>I only back up the ShareLatex projects in my Dropbox if for whatever reason I need offline access later. Has worked well so far.
I have some projects where the continuous-integration-testing with Travis requires a tex installation. More than 50% of the entire test run is spent installing texlive-full (since Travis doesn't seem interested in including latex in their standard environment). Maybe TinyTeX will be able to speed this up?
In my experience, TeX needs some packaging/distribution love. Also in my experience, overleaf/sharelatex (web based) blows all of the local installation approaches out of the water. Especially with respect to collaboration with coauthors of your documents.
Shamelessly promoting something that I wrote myself:<p><a href="https://github.com/ProdriveTechnologies/bazel-latex" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ProdriveTechnologies/bazel-latex</a><p>These are rules for building LaTeX documents using the Bazel build system. What's pretty nifty is that these download (parts of) TeXLive automatically, meaning that you don't even need to install TeXLive in your home directory. Instead, it's part of your project, meaning that everyone working on it will use exactly the same version of TeXLive.
On a tangential note, I wish there were a single-executable "distribution" of Plain TeX that would simply "do one thing well" - convert a TeX source to more or less nicely typeset PDF.
On Mac I prefer BasicTex: <a href="https://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html</a><p>One can install it very simple via<p>$ brew cask install basictex<p>And it doesn't take ages to download and install like other TeX-Distributions.<p>see also <a href="https://bilalakil.me/getting-started-and-productive-with-latex-basictex-on-os-x-terminal/" rel="nofollow">https://bilalakil.me/getting-started-and-productive-with-lat...</a>
I grew irritated with texlive and instead just opted to use <a href="https://overleaf.com" rel="nofollow">https://overleaf.com</a> for my LaTeX documents
I think various flavors of Markdown have largely superseded TeX, at least for stylistic minimalists. I'm not saying that TeX is obsolete, but for the majority of use cases, Markdown is faster and less troublesome. Modernity always triumphs.