Requires pdflatex but does not bundle it about ipe.appimage HOT 5 OPEN

Latex is a beast. Even the basic installation is a couple of 100 MB. I wouldn't want to bundle it with every App that is using it. Imagine bundling it with a Latex editor. The editor is useless without Latex, but having a Latex distro for every Latex editor you install is a bit much.

I think Latex is one of the things that really needs a package manager and the Windows and Mac versions even come with their own package manager.

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Agree that this is an interesting edge case... although the general philosophy of AppImage is the same as for Android or iOS apps: What can't be assumed to be part of the base system needs to be bundled with the app. Maybe we can brainstorm on https://gitter.im/probonopd/AppImageKit

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I respect your decision but it would be good if it was mentioned in the README.md that it was a concious decision to require Latex to be installed and working as a prerequisite for this AppImage to work. Even better, a small wrapper script that checks for Latex and give a GUI warning if not installed.

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reopened, so I'm reminded to add a wrapper script.

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I'd like to add my two cents:

• Ipe is perfectly usable without Latex - as long as you don't create text objects. If you do, you'll get an error message that Latex could not be run.
• A minimal Latex installation is actually not that large (<20MB in the compressed image), as I found out when I had to bundle one with my Ipe snap (https://github.com/otfried/ipe-tools/tree/master/snap).
• However, a Latex installation is never complete. If you provide one, you also need to provide the tools to add packages and fonts to the installation, because users will always want to add some obscure package that you didn't even know about. Since the appimage is in a read-only file system, these would have to be stored somewhere in the user's home directory. Texlive does allow for a "user tree", but it doesn't work as well as one would like. Texlive seems to assume that texmf-var is in a writable file system and sometimes tries to write to that to update some database even when you install into the user tree.

So I fully agree that the Ipe appimage should not try to bundle Latex - in fact I'm quite unhappy that I had to do it for the snap, but snap encapsulation gives Ipe no access to the Latex outside the snap :-(

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