4 ms·
> avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow How slow can it be today? I did typeset one book using LaTeX and the tricky part was that it ha
by TacticalCoder 4y ago
> avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow
How slow can it be today? I did typeset one book using LaTeX and the tricky part was that it had to look like a series of books typeset with QuarkXPress, so it took me lots of time to modify/adapt LaTeX so that the output would match what the editor wanted. Later on I simply used QuarkXPress: not that I didn't like LaTeX but... I got a Mac with QuarkXPress.
But that was in the late nineties. Back when compiling, say, Emacs, took 45 minutes (which now takes 2 minutes or less depending on your system). Certainly LaTeX did benefit greatly too from advances in computing power during a quarter of a century? How can rendering a LaTeX document be still slow today?
- bee_rider 4y agoUsually? It is not so bad as long as you don't accidentally add a bunch of compiler passes. In general? LaTeX is a turing complete language so I guess you could write an infinite loop. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requiring-infinitely-many-compiler-passes https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requi...
- cge 4y agoFor an extreme case, I have a large supplementary information document for a paper, of around 175 pages, that takes, if I recall correctly, around 10 minutes to compile on a modern machine. Working on it was frustrating enough that we had methods for compiling small portions we were working on at a given moment, and often used draft mode for the full document. However, this was for a document that, before post-processing, results in a 375 MB PDF, with thousands of included images and PDFs. It has never been that annoying for any normal document I've worked on. The major source of frustration was that there is no partial rebuilding of the document in LaTeX: fixing one word on one page, even if it did not result in any change on the other pages, would require multiple (because of references) compilations of the entire, enormous document, even just to get some sense of what the resulting document would look like. This is a problem that is somewhat unique to LaTeX, I think.
- jimhefferon 4y agoI agree that on modern hardware recompiling is pretty fast. I have a 445 page book (https://gitlab.com/jim.hefferon/toc https://gitlab.com/jim.hefferon/toc) with more than a graphic per page and lots of code inclusion, cross references, etc. The command "time pdflatex book" gives this on my 2016 laptop under Ubuntu. real 0m18.159s, user 0m17.747s, sys 0m0.296s Not instantaneous but considering the job, pretty good. I no longer bother with \includeonly.
- ephimetheus 4y agoMy PhD thesis compiled for about 45mins (300+ pages)