I have accounting software (keme) that I use in Spanish. The reports use texlive-latex but any tex / latex would be OK. After converting to Leap 42.3 I reinstalled the software and I have just reinstalled texlive-latex using Yast. The total installed size for texlive-latex is 1.1 GB!
This really is overkill and it takes about 30 minutes. I don’t think I have any other app that uses texlive and I do not use it for creating new output reports. Apart from US and UK English I chat and write documents in Spanish and German. In the near future I am going to provide some software for English and Spanish users but my development environment is Drupal 8 (texlive not needed).
Can anyone please recommend a much smaller texlive alternative for the accounting package?
It does not matter what platform you are using LaTeX comes as a distribution and, if you ask for any element in it, the default behaviour is to download the core of the distribution. This does not just include LaTeX packages but packages such as pdfjam for manipulating PDFs which you can use on any PDFs, not just LaTeX generated ones.
So, while you may not need much for keme, there are other things you might find useful in what you have downloaded.
Unfortunately texlive without dependencies doesn’t work (“Problem with Latex”). I tried several combinations. I would have to delve into the depths of the main QT5 scripts and tables to find out what and how it uses Latex. In the end I reinstalled the 1GB solution. I won’t need this software much longer.
Thanks John. Yes, the increasing need to cater for pdf must not be forgotten. However the download of texlive-latex (with dependencies) as provided by Yast contains hundreds if not thousands of files for all the world’s languages. I have the feeling zypper’s install is shorter. At this stage I only need Spanish. The format of the keme reports in LaTex is very attractive - a lot of work has gone into this (and keme is free). However my current interest is academic. By June my company will be finally wound up, leaving only potential tax inspections (last six years).
It wasn’t always that way. At one time, you had to install only one or two packages. But it was still more than 1G. They were huge packages. There’s probably no such thing as “a tiny texlive-latex”.
On the other hand – when I install openSUSE and add texlive, it still takes way less disk space than a Microsoft Windows install.
If your interests are academic, you should definitely be exploring LaTeX - the best academic typesetting program by far and with bibliographic database features unavailable anywhere else. See my handout on using LyX with LaTeX in academia: https://johnrhudson.me.uk/computing/LyX_for_academia.pdf