I just gave it a try, removing tetex shouldn't cause too much of a problem. It's a text processor -- you create a tex file, run an executable, and output into a different file format. Interestingly enough, kpackage says debconf depends on it; according to synaptic, tetex-base and tetex-bin were just removed without any conflicts.

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While you're at it, you'll probably want to remove lyx ( the tex editor ) and auctex ( tex mode for Emacs ).