smallest latex installation

[MichaelBurns]

How do I get the absolute smallest latex installation? Right now, I try texlive-latex-base, but it installs to over 100MB already, and a good portion of that seems to be just for documentation. At the very least, does anyone know how to install latex without the documentation?

[MichaelBurns]

bump

[MichaelBurns]

bump

[kalwisti]

As far as I know, it is not possible to omit that documentation because it is part of the base install of TeX Live (TL). One of the top level directories of TL is called texmf; one of texmf's subdirectories is TEXMFMAIN, which holds configuration files, helper scripts and program documentation.

For an overview, you might have a look here:

http://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-100002.2
Berry, Karl, ed. "The TeX Live Guide: TeX Live 2010."
(See Sections 2.2 and 2.3)

Lucid Lynx has TL 2009 in its repositories. I checked just now and noticed that texlive (2009-7) [ca. 215 MB], which is described as being "a decent selection of the TeX Live packages," will pull in texlive-doc-base (1 MB), texlive-latex-base-doc (41 MB), texlive-latex-recommended-doc (15 MB), texlive-fonts-recommended-doc (2 MB) and texlive-pstricks-doc (58 MB). I don't believe they can be excluded from the download.

If space is really tight on your hard drive, once you have installed TL, I imagine it could be possible to navigate into the texmf tree and delete the documentation. Most of it appears to be stored in

/usr/share/texmf/doc and
/usr/share/texmf-texlive/doc

However, I do not recommend this, as it's potentially risky to alter the standard TL directory structure unless you know what you're doing. You should check with a TeXpert before trying something like that.

I'm sorry if this isn't the answer you wanted to hear ... TeX is an amazing tool, but is a complex -- and large -- set of programs. (The full install of TeX Live is ca. 1 GB in size). TeXperts are usually meticulous about creating documentation; I think there is an assumption that they expect TeX users to RTFM when in doubt.

If someone else knows a trick for omitting the basic documentation, I hope that they will chime in.