[BlindMath] TeX Hour: Thu 27 May: Understand + refactor TeX Live: more flexible + agile

[Jonathan Fine]

Aside: I hope these ideas will in time help developers put LaTeX
accessibility tools into the hands of authors and support staff.

Hi

Tomorrow's TeX Hour is about understanding and refactoring TeX Live to make
it more flexible and agile.  The TeX Hour is Thursday 27 May, 6:30 to
7:30pm UK time.

The UK time now is at https://time.is/UK. The zoom details are
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09
Meeting ID: 785 5125 5396
Passcode: knuth

Last week Yihui Xie explained why and how he developed TinyTeX to support
users of R-Markdown. This greatly reduces the barrier to entry to using
TeX. TinyTeX is a 100MB subset of TeXLive. My first PC, bought in 1989 to
run TeX, had a 40MB hard disk (and 2MB of memory and a 10Mhz CPU).

Don Knuth wrote TeX to be archival. To give identical results from
identical inputs. My TeX source file is just one of many inputs. Recording
and exactly reproducing the other inputs is vital, to fully benefit from
the hard work of Don Knuth that made TeX archival.

One goal is to make it much easier to archive all the resources used when a
document is typeset. And at a different time and place, and on a different
machine, gather those resources to typeset the document again. Maybe via
GitHub actions, as part of Continuous Integration.

Another goal is to make it much easier to package a subset of TeX just for
a special purpose. Beginner? You want to make a math presentation? Download
and install a Beamer app. A few minutes later, you're ready to start
authoring.

Interested? Please email me, or come along to the TeX Hour. I welcome your
experience and ideas. My starting point will be statistics from the last
ten years of the TeX Live DVDs.

The video from last week (R Markdown + Tiny TeX: with Yihui Xie) is at:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw1FZfIX1w7jotP_oOeQBrs-OvwwO_k3v

with best regards

Jonathan