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I've often wondered why there isn't a dependency system for TeX that lets you get only the packages you need... feed it a document and tell it to automatically download and install any missing packages.

There may be some technical reason why this isn't practical. Anyone know, offhand?

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Totally practical and supported. See MikTeX: https://miktex.org/kb/just-enough-tex

But the reason I don't use it is because I don't always have Internet when I need to write my document. I'd rather download all the packages and their documentation beforehand.

MikTeX also supports downloading individual packages, though I wish there was an option to download, say, the most commonly used 1GB or something.

When stuck on a plane without wifi the only thing I could find on my computer to read were the Tex manuals. Good stuff.

There is a TeX distribution that does what you say, TinyTeX. For some reason it is obscure and only really used by R and R Studio users. That may be because it is used to render R Markdown documents to pdf.

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