How should I deal with packages that require FFI external libraries?

[Peter Flynn]

I'd like to include this in Formatting information, if I may.

Peter

On 21/04/2023 22:43, Karl Berry wrote:
> Hi Bruno - you know this, but I can't replying anyway:
> 
>      they did not understand why a TeX
>      install was more than a few hundred magabytes
> 
> You can tell them that if all they want to do is typeset their math
> papers, they can use BasicTeX == scheme-small ~ 550MB. Admittedly still
> not tiny, but plausible nowadays even on fairly small machines.
> 
> The most minimal scheme including LaTeX is scheme-basic, some 265MB.
> Perfectly capable of typesetting straightforward documents, but of
> course lacks almost all add-on packages, say, revtex, which is included
> in scheme-small.
> 
> The answer to why full TL is so big (currently 7.5+GB) is that it
> includes all the fonts, support for all languages including CJK, all
> macros, etc. Support to typeset any document in (more or less) any
> script anywhere in the world takes space ...
> 
> Feel free to forward this to anyone who questions why TL contains what
> it does. --hope this helps somehow, karl.