Formatting Information

A full installation of TEX Live (eg the TEX Live ‘scheme-full’ or the texlive-full Linux package) is just over 8GB, but there are several smaller schemes. These contain the programs, fonts, and a subset of classes and packages for users with limited disk space, but you can always download anything else you need from CTAN using the TEX Live Manager program tlmgr.

Scheme-full

This includes all the programs, classes, packages, support and ancillary files, 500+ typeface families, and support for hundreds of languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK), Hebrew, Arabic, and many others — enough to support typesetting any document in (more or less) any script anywhere in the world.

Scheme-medium

This is the scheme-small scheme but with more packages and languages.

Scheme-small

If all you want to do is typeset a math paper, you can use scheme-small, which is about 200MB. Admittedly still not tiny, but plausible nowadays even on fairly small machines, and includes XƎLATEX and LuaLATEX, which is recommended.

Scheme-basic

The most minimal scheme including LATEX is scheme-basic, some 265MB. Perfectly capable of typesetting straightforward documents, but lacks almost all add-on packages which are included in scheme-small.

Scheme-minimal

For plain TEX only (no LATEX at all).

There are other options for specialist pusposes which are out of scope for this book.

Installation sizes

Max Chernoff writes:

When you run the install-tl script at https://tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html it lists the disk space used for each option. Running some tests [Jan 2026] shows:

Scheme	Type	Size (MB)
full scheme	[doc+src]:	9319 MB
full scheme	[doc]:	8872 MB
full scheme	[-]:	4312 MB
medium scheme	[doc+src]:	2375 MB
medium scheme	[-]:	813 MB
small scheme	[-]:	210 MB
basic scheme	[-]:	116 MB
minimal scheme	[-]:	49 MB
infrastructure scheme	[-]:	2 MB
book publishing scheme	[-]:	168 MB
ConTeXt scheme	[doc+src]:	871 MB
ConTeXt scheme	[doc]:	848 MB
ConTeXt scheme	[-]:	511 MB

You can select the scheme on the command line with the of install-tl command by typing one of the scheme (-s) options:

install-tl -s full
install-tl -s small
install-tl -s basic

This can be more convenient than doing it via the menus if you are comfortable using the command line. Before you start, you should always check to see if there is a more recent version of the installation program online. See item ‘Use the latest versions’ below for more details.