Re: tlc3 scheme -> scheme-small?

On 2026-01-23 at 14:19:05 -0700, Karl Berry wrote:

 > I constructed (script attached) a scheme with the tlc3 packages from
 > https://raw.githubusercontent.com/latex3/tagging-project/refs/heads/main/_data/tagging-status.yml
 > and added collection-latex (the core packages), which are
 > inconsequential for the size. Unfiltered, the result is (not
 > surprisingly) about 1.7GB.
 > 
 > I manually removed a bunch of font and other "multilingual" packages,
 > reducing the installed size to 230MB.  (Exclusions listed in the script below.)
 > 
 > That is only a tiny bit larger than the existing scheme-small for the
 > Mac "BasicTeX" (223MB), so I compared the two schemes. The most
 > significant (in size) is that s-small contains xetex. Attached below as
 > comm output, first column is packages only in s-small, second column are
 > those only in s-tlc3. Other than that, the additional packages in
 > s-small are small in size and seem rather useful, on the whole.  (As one
 > would hope. :) The biggest package only in s-tlc3 is tex4ht (~50MB).
 > 
 > My first reaction is that instead of making users pick between two
 > similar sets of packages (on what basis?), we could add the tlc3
 > packages to s-small (assuming Dick and Herb are ok with that).  The
 > total size would then be increased to ~313MB, but that still seems
 > pretty "small" to me.  Admittedly we couldn't say that every package in
 > the scheme is described in tlc3 (only the converse), but the benefit of
 > not creating yet another scheme outweighs that in my mind.
 > 
 > Wdyt? --thanks, karl.

# big packages we omit.
  my @omit_list = qw(
.... amsfonts ....

Hi Karl,
omitting amsfonts is not a good idea despite its size.  Please try
this with amsfonts omitted or with scheme-minimal:

  pdftex '\relax This is a bitmap font.\bye'

The fonts are created by Metafont.

The size of the amsfonts package is 62 MB.  It would be nicer to have
packages like

   amsfonts-cm
   amsfonts-cmextra
   amsfonts-cyrillic
   amsfonts-euler
   amsfonts-latxfont
   amsfonts-symbols

and an amsfonts package which contains dependencies only.  I don't
know whether this can be achieved without much effort by the scripts
but it would help to keep the tlc scheme small.  At least cyrillic and
euler can be omitted here.

Max, if you intend to load packages on-the-fly the above invocation
will trigger Metafont too but in your case the solution is very
simple: just append amsfonts.map to pdftex.map in advance.  In this
case the Type 1 fonts are required and your script will download and
install the missing amsfonts package.

I'm not sure that MiKTeX does it right.  I occasionally encounter PDF
files with bitmap fonts created with MiKTeX and the output of pdffonts
looks like this:

name         type      encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------ --------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
[none]       Type 3    Custom           yes no  no      76  0
[none]       Type 3    Custom           yes no  no      77  0
[none]       Type 3    Custom           yes no  no      78  0

I've never seen bitmap fonts in PDF files created with TeX Live for
decades.  But I can create them easily with scheme-minimal.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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