[mbreese]

It requires choices and knowing what to install and if things don’t work, troubleshooting the install can be difficult. For a first time task of “install latex”, it’s not the easiest. Especially for newer users. I e done it half a dozen times and I’m still not quite sure if I’ve done it right on my Mac (right away).

[anta40]

On mac: `brew install texlive`

Been using texlive for years (also use it on Windows)

[meling]

I wasn’t aware of a brew package; I will definitely check that out. I have always been using the texlive installer for macOS (MacTeX), which is very easy to use. Although the install instructions can be a bit long and important to read when Apple breaks things.

https://tug.org/texlive/

[g15jv2dp]

Enjoy your 10GB of PDF documentation for packages you'll never use.

[tombert]

Is 10 gigs really that much nowadays? I have to think that if you're frequenting HN you're likely to have at least a terabyte in storage on your personal computer?

[mbreese]

It’s not about the HN visitor… it’s about the collaborator or grad student who might be on an entry level computer with 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The entire system needs to be easy for them to install and maintain. And even if I have 1TB of storage, if I could avoid an extra 10GB of space in my backups, I’d appreciate it.

[WolfOliver]

try MonsterWriter, it caters to exactly this group of users

[seec]

The fact that you don't seem to realize that downloading 10GB of stuff just to edit/generate PDF documents is completely bonkers just shows how out of touch Latex afficionados are.

As far as I'm concerned, the outputs are pretty good but until somehow really makes no-nonsense software that can do that in an efficient manner, it might as well not exist at all.