math

I set up

  1. LaTeX, and explain its flags (detailed-ish)
  2. R with disabled LTO, mentioning nix-shell (short)
  3. Octave (uninteresting)

1. latex

Blah blah, LaTeX collections.

Not to handhold, but you can just check /var/db/repos/gentoo/dev-texlive/texlive-$USE_FLAG_NAME if the USE flag is a TeXLive collection, e.g. luatex.

green  : local USE flag

yellow : global USE flag or enabled by profile

red    : I ignore it

feature flag
X11 I guess? X (from make.conf)
Multi-byte east Asian characters cjk
ConTeXt macros. Less common to use. context
Goodies such as titlesec and enumitem extra
Chess images, etc. games
graphicx, tikz, pgfplot... graphics
Special figures/citations/etc. for law, critical texts, linguistics, e.g. bibleref, adtrees, jura humanities
LuaLaTeX has a better macro language and better Unicode support, but can be slower luatex
metapost (niche parametrized PostScript vector art macros) metapost
probably png-related stuff...? maybe tikz needs it? idk png
more PostScript stuff pstricks
goodies such as apa7 publishers
must-haves like amsmath, amssymb, physics science
latex to html conversion (but I use pandoc-bin) tex4ht
more latex to html conversion (...pandoc-bin) texi2html
what situations make you need special freetype fonts? idk truetype
XeTeX (as opposed to LuaTeX or pdflatex) xetex
idk when we use xml files, it hasn't come up xml
/etc/portage/package.use/math
app-text/texlive extra graphics luatex png science

2. R

A lot of R packages fail to compile under LTO.

/etc/portage/package.use/math
dev-lang/R cairo perl png # cairo+png for image gen support
sys-libs/zlib minizip
/etc/portage/package.env/no-lto
dev-lang/R no-lto

If you want to skip compiling, you can run R in a nix-shell, though graphics will be an enormous hassle. See nix ⇗.

3. Octave

Simple USE flags for the open-source equivalent to MATLAB.

/etc/portage/package.use/math
sci-mathematics/octave gnuplot imagemagick