Re: Sizes of TL distribution

Hi Peter,

On Sat, 2026-01-17 at 14:43 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
> Is there a list on the tug.org site of the installed sizes of the
> various TL install schemes (eg those in 3.2.2 of the install doc)?  I
> get occasional queries from users wanting to know if they need the whole
> thing,

No, but when you run the install-tl script

    https://tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html

it lists the disk space used for each option. Running some tests right now:

    full scheme            [doc+src]: 9319 MB
    full scheme            [doc]:     8872 MB
    full scheme            [-]:       4312 MB
    medium scheme          [doc+src]: 2375 MB
    medium scheme          [-]:        813 MB
    small scheme           [-]:        210 MB
    basic scheme           [-]:        116 MB
    minimal scheme         [-]:         49 MB
    infrastructure scheme  [-]:          2 MB
    book publishing scheme [-]:        168 MB
    ConTeXt scheme         [doc+src]:  871 MB
    ConTeXt scheme         [doc]:      848 MB
    ConTeXt scheme         [-]:        511 MB

I don't have the patience to try every possible option, but hopefully
this is enough to give you an idea.

The "medium scheme" without documentation and source is probably the
smallest scheme that's useful to a non-expert user, but even then,
you'll probably still need to manually install a few packages. The
"infrastructure-only scheme" can also work fairly well if you're willing
to manually install every single package/font/engine that you use, but
this is definitely an option for advanced users only. I'm also a pretty
big fan of the "ConTeXt scheme", but I suspect that that won't be very
useful for most users :).

For a beginner, the "full scheme" without documentation and source would
be my default recommendation. It takes up an irritatingly-large amount
of space, but hard drives are big enough these days that it shouldn't
cause any real problems, and getting constant "file not found" errors is
not very much fun for a beginner.

> and does tlmgr auto-install missing packages during LaTeX
> execution

No, it does not. MiKTeX has this feature though, so if that's an
important feature for these users, then they can install that instead.
(This is a TeX Live list, so we're obviously biased in favour of TL, but
MiKTeX is a perfectly fine distribution, and this is definitely its
biggest advantage over TL, so I have no problem recommending it in this
case).

Thanks,
-- Max