I am building a system from scratch (LFS) and want to use it solely for document preparation.
The only applications I want to have on it are:

1. Emacs
2. some LaTeX distro, probably Tetex (coz its in the BLFS book).
3. A viewer (DVI or PDF)

Will I have to install Xorg just for one single program, i.e. xdvi?
I wish to have a text-only system with no X installed.

Also, what programs are available for viewing images on text-only systems.
I tried googling no-X apps, but its just not working. . .

Not sure if there's a better way, however, on a quick thought I think that:

1.- you could use pdftotext
2.- if the visual aspect is important, you might have some degree of success by using pdf2html, then use links -g (which works on framebuffer) to view the resulting file

This one works ok under directfb:
http://www.directfb.org/dfbsee.xml

The TeX typesetting system is pretty ancient.
What previewer did people use when GUIs werent popular?

Is there a way to have X apps work without complete X server, using maybe only some X libraries?

Not really. The whole point of having an X server is that the server will take care of the graphic part.

However there are some toolkits that will run on top of framebuffer, like qtopia. There was a similar project for gtk2 though I have no idea if that's still developed (or how stable/usable it is at all) and I have not any relevant url on my bookmarks.


Also look here:
http://linux.bytesex.org/fbida/

Now that I think of it, some image viewers might just work. Some image viewers handle pdf's just fine, it's a matter of finding one that works on console under framebuffer (framebuffer will be required, there's no way around that if you want to display graphics).