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I basically use MiKTeX for converting Markdown documents & Jupyter notebooks into PDF files (with pandoc) and never use it for making documents (as a text editor). But my MiKTeX installation happens to contain a large number of big packages that are of no use to me. But I cannot find a way to get rid of them. In the Packages section of MiKTeX console, there's an option to see all installed packages where there are many packages installed to support non English languages. And they tend to be bigger in size (each in 200 - 300 MiB range). I have no need for languages of non Latin origin. So, these packages (e.g support for middle eastern languages & Asian languages) are essentially a bloat for me. I would like to remove these and keep my installation at a bare minimum. Is there a way to do this?
I'm open to remove MiKTeX and switch to another application if I cannot do this in MiKTeX, but that application must be able to get my job done (converting Jupyter notebooks, Markdown files & RMarkdown documents to pdf). The fact I really don't need the TeXworks text editor that's bundled with MiKTeX either makes me willing switch to any other minimal versions of LaTeX systems. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!.

P.S I'm on a Windows 10 machine. MiKTeX version 22.7 (MiXTeX console version 4.7).

Anoban Karunananthan
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2 Answers2

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You may want to check TinyTex which is a lightweight, cross-platform, portable, and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution based on TeXLive.

And also another option could be for you to make a switch to Quarto which would get your job (converting Jupyter notebooks, Markdown files & RMarkdown documents to pdf) done easily.

And Most importantly, while converting to pdf it will install only those latex packages that are necessary for the rendering process of the file (If they are not installed only).

Read this Get Started Guide to know how to install Quarto and You can use this with VS code, Jupyter Lab, Rstudio or any other text editor.

And to render

  • Jupyter notebooks to pdf see here
  • Rmarkdown files to pdf see here
  • And you can render markdown files to pdf in the same of Rmarkdown files.

And lastly, I am not a MiKTex user, so actually can't be of help addressing the original problem of yours. Hopefully someone other may have solution regarding the problem.

shafee
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LaTeX by its nature is a 4GB+ "Distro" of interdependent modules so LiveTex TinyTex MiKTeX and W32TeX have package managers.

texlive2022-20220321.iso 2022-03-21 22:59 4.3G
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For MiKTeX its easy to command line or GUI

MiKTeX Remove [--package-id-file file] package-id...

e.g. Remove installed MiKTeX packages. see https://docs.miktex.org/manual/miktex-packages.html However best to use the GUI admin to resolve some inter dependency.

“Just enough TeX” MiKTeX supports the notion of a scalable TeX system: users install just the TeX packages they need for their authoring tasks.

Date: 7/18/2022 File name: basic-miktex-22.7-x64.exe Size: 132.71 MB
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your minimal TeX system From now on, whenever a package is required which hasn't been installed yet, the package installer comes into play.

Due to the nature of "on the fly" installation setting it can appear less stable than the full ProTex variant. But if set correctly any removed essentials should be auto renewed when necessary.

Generally MiKTeX is the best distro suite for western windows users, just as W(in)32Tex is more suited to eastern windows users.

TinyTex is best for R users and is modeled on MiKTeX

I appreciate one nice feature of MiKTeX on Windows (which seems to be cross-platform now): automatically installing missing LaTeX packages. I think this is very helpful, so I borrowed this feature to the R package tinytex,

TinyTeX-v2022.08.zip 226 MB
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K J
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