At 7.5GB, 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.
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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX
Appendix A: Installation
Section 1: Size and space for TEX Live
A full installation of TEX Live (eg the TEX Live ‘scheme-full’ or the texlive-full Linux package) is just over 7.5GB, but there are two smaller but more limited schemes called ‘scheme-small’ and ‘scheme-basic’. These contain the programs, fonts, and a small subset of classes and packages to save disk space, but you can always download anything else you need from CTAN.
- Scheme-full
- Scheme-small
If all you want to do is typeset a math papers, you can use scheme-small, which is about 550MB. Admittedly still not tiny, but plausible nowadays even on fairly small machines.
- Scheme-basic
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 which are included in scheme-small.
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.