At date and time Tue, 31 Mar 2015 15:18:36 +0200, tlaronde wrote: > On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 12:24:51PM +0100, Gerard Lally wrote: > > > > As someone who uses groff as a lightweight alternative to TeX and > > friends** > > FWIW, I have developed a minimal TeX system: kerTeX > (http://www.kergis.com/kertex.html) (french; english at > http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html). > > A minimal install can be as small as 8MB. The default (with the AMS > fonts, e-TeX, dvips, MetaPost, bibtex and the Adobe standard PostScript > fonts metrics) is less than 40MB. > > The advantage of the TeX system is that it is self-sufficient : it > includes fonts and the mean to design them.
Thank you for this reminder Thierry. I took note of your work a long time ago and will certainly keep it in mind should I abandon groff, but for now I have invested some time in learning groff. To Greg and Eric: thank you for your replies. I suppose the long and the short of it is that a powerful typesetting system - groff - is already there, in base. It's not really about the space used, but rather that a minimal NetBSD setup comes pre-loaded with industrial-strength document layout and typesetting software. To my mind that is quite amazing, and it speaks volumes about both NetBSD and groff. NetBSD packs a lot of punch into the base system and I feel it would be sad to sacrifice that power for what seems to me little or no gain. -- Gerard Lally