Size of Windows installer of LibreOffice 3.3 – that contained all languages – was 253MB. In LibreOffice 3.4 we managed shrink it significantly, to 197MB. It would have been nice to measure how each cleanup commit contributed to this achievement, but I’m afraid the most important factor was the right setting of compression levels.
Not much have happened since then, we added new languages, new dictionaries, new features, and cleanup continued, but the size of installer remained approximately the same: 198MB for LibreOffice 3.6.0.
However, in LibreOffice 3.7 there will be some improvement in this field. A couple of days ago Istvan Turi – who spent 6 weeks with LibreOffice hacking as a trainee at Novell Hungary – committed a few patches and I also committed one, which removed all language dependent agenda/fax/letter/report and spreadsheet style templates. Approximately 2000 files were removed from git. Even more were removed from installer, because these templates were not localized into all supported languages, so en-US templates were copied for them. Size of installer has been decreased to 185MB, 6.57% less than before.
The good news is that we did not loose functionality here. Localization will be done runtime. Translators can translate strings from these templates in .po files. I bet that many language teams did not know about these templates, now they have the chance to localize them properly.