Getting Tex on My Macintosh: Web-Based Editors & Alternatives

[futurebird]

Okay, I started doing some reading about getting Tex for my mac. I don't need anything fancy, in fact the tex tool that you guys use at this online forum has everything that I need.

I'd like to be able to type up and print short homework assignments. I'm not at the level where I need to compose big fancy research papers.

So I found this "all in one" tex package and downloaded it, but it's too large for my hard drive. It needs 1GB of space. I only have about 200MB of free space. (My computer is old and I am poor)

Since Tex is simple enough to run in a web-based forum why can't I find something smaller?

Is there a web-based editor?

 

[D H]

TeXShop needs but 33 MB, installed. That should leave more than enough room for the download size plus the installed size.

 

[mgb_phys]

That must inlcude a lot of fonts and a complicated gui editor.
Tex is small - it was written when hard drives were in kilobytes.
I don't use mac but there are lots of tex for mac pages on google.

Remember all you need is.
The tex (or preferably latex engine), some fonts, a viewer
You might not even need the viewer if you use tex->pdf and have a pdf viewer.

 

[las3rjock]

Use i-installer: http://ii2.sourceforge.net/ . All you need to have a working (La)TeX installation is to install gwTeX (the one based on TeX Live; teTeX is deprecated). Then, if you want, you can install a (La)TeX editor. Warning: TeX Live is still pretty large (210 MB), so you will want to free up some disk space if you can.

I think you downloaded MacTeX ( http://www.tug.org/mactex/ ), which is i-installer plus every LaTeX editor, spellchecker, BibTeX front end, and LaTeX package under the sun. The compressed disk image is something like 750 MB, so it's no surprise that I would take 1 GB to install it all.