Enjoy the trip (or do the most of it at least)!
So... I really did not think about the LaTex packages sizes until now you and @travelingmercies commented it and it is true that I remember it took a while to download.
The packages available in ubuntu that I installed were: texlive-latex-base, texlive-fonts-recommendend, texlive-fonts-extra, texlive-latex-extra
And checking their sizes I get:
Those sizes are in kB and... it is true that they are surpsingly big. The packets that look the basic installation of latex may be not so hevy so maybe it the basics + the latex-extra package could weight about less that 300 MB. The extra fonts package weights more than 1GB! I would say that the whole package in my case weights less thatn 2GB, but it is quite much more than what I was expecting to be honest. @travelingmercies, you will have to explain us how you did it to have it in 95MB!
I think what I did is only applicable for Mac OS users. The TeX distribution for Mac is MacTeX, this contains the full distribution (4GB) and other components like GUI applications, which I think is not needed for the tasks at the moment.
I opted for the smaller distribution which is the BasicTeX (also for Mac users), it contains the standard tools of TeX Live such as TeX, LaTeX, pdfTeX, and more. And the BasicTeX is only 95MB. :) Hope this is helpful for the other participants, since you're using Ubuntu, maybe it's different for your case.
Thanks a lot for the info! I am sure will be useful in the future.
Exactly, for me in Ubuntu was different. Probably there is a way to install even only more basic packages.
We will try to see what we can do at the code level. This is definitely something that needs to be fixed.
I have open a GitHub issue to remember, and will try to address it at some point (I was in the US for work this week, and had no time to be close to the chain).
Definitely! :)