details of recommended TeX installation in the manual

[tpapp]

(Continuing discussion that came up in #206)

The manual could contain a few hints on the recommended TeX suite.

The kitchen sink approach

Specifically, we recommend full and recent TeXLive if possible.

On Debian/Ubuntu, this would be texlive-full. I think one can get away with less but that should be up to the user, or should we provide a detailed list? (it may become obsolete as packages are split and merged).

On Windows, I believe that TeXLive installs just fine.

On OS X, I think that MacTeX is the preferred way to install TeXLive, but I am not sure.

Bare minimum?

We could figure out the very minimum required to render plots with the default setup, as a list of files/LaTeX packages. But very few people install LaTeX that way and they should be able to figure out stuff from the error messages.

[ptoche]

I'm installing tex 2021 on MacOS and indeed I can confirm that MacTeX is the most common way to install it.

http://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html

It's a 4.4GB download so I wouldn't be surprised if some users would like to install only the required packages.

[ptoche]

I wonder how much the other tools are needed for a minimal usage. Instructions in the manual are clear, but there are a lot of steps:

pdf2svg: https://github.com/dawbarton/pdf2svg
poppler: https://poppler.freedesktop.org/
cairo: https://www.cairographics.org/download/
Xpdf: http://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html

[tpapp]

Frankly, a few GB are not a lot these days, so this issue may be not be that relevant any more so I would just recommend a full TeX suite.

Those who need are really space-constrained should just figure it out (and set up a test suite in a production environment). Since the requirements also depend on the content of plots, it is not trivial to specify a bare minimum.