10 ms·
It's always possible to sandbox the processes. In that sense, it's not very different from the various http://try.$PROGRAMMINGLANGUAGE.org http://try.$PROGRAMMI
by emillon 13y ago
It's always possible to sandbox the processes. In that sense, it's not very different from the various http://try.$PROGRAMMINGLANGUAGE.org http://try.$PROGRAMMINGLANGUAGE.org. For most of the sandboxing techniques, the performance can be however problematic.
What's peculiar about latex is that its compilation model is ridiculously inefficient. There's no separate compilation, so you have to re-run the whole compilation at the tiniest change. Also, there's a lot of I/O involved, and a several passes are needed. For example, to display the table of contents, it is necessary to append to a temporary file a list of commands (emitted by \section{} etc) which will be interpreted, in a following pass (it is necessary to manually re-run the compiler) by \tableofcontents.
- denzil_correa 13y ago> What's peculiar about latex is that its compilation model is ridiculously inefficient. There's no separate compilation, so you have to re-run the whole compilation at the tiniest change. Is there a scope for LaTex to have "delta compilation"? This is particularly required if you make presentations using LaTex (Beamer). The whole recompilation process is pretty painful once the number of slides (which includes transitions) go past ~20. Currently, there are some "workarounds" for it, but it would be nice if such a feature exists.
- edelans 13y agoI use https://www.writelatex.com/ https://www.writelatex.com/ where I have a 17 pages (pdf) of math exercices, and I don't know how they deal with it, but apparently they manage to make incremental "recompilation process", because when I make an online modification on the Latex code, the modification appears almost anstantaneously on the preview pdf aside the code !
- aw3c2 13y agoYou are lucky. I am working on a ~80 page report and it takes 40 seconds for a new word to appear.
- jimhefferon 13y agoI'm astonished by that time number. I have a 400 page book, with a 150 page answers to exercises that is emmitted as part of the book compilation and then compiled on its own. I use a simple shell script that compiles each twice (for the cross-referencing). It takes perhaps 10 secs on my five year old middle of the road laptop. Are you remaking complex drawings each time? What is the performance sink, I wonder?
- aw3c2 13y agoSorry, it seems like there was a misunderstanding. It takes this on writelatex.com, not my local machine. There it's a normal 7-8 seconds. Just text and about 50 png/jpg images.
- VMG 13y agoMy workaround to cut down compilation time is splitting up the document into parts and always only compiling the part I'm working on.
- denzil_correa 13y agoI have tried a similar work around but it turns a bit messy if you are in the paper publication business (which I am). Camera ready copies (final publication) sucks the remaining "work around motivation" out of you.
- emillon 13y agoIn case people don't know, there's a built-in command to do this: \includeonly.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- denzil_correa 13y agoI am not sure if they are doing an "incremental" process. From what I understand, they have a real time preview which compiles the document in the background.
- weavie 13y agoHas anyone ever tried to refactor and sort Latex out? As such a widely used and important app, it really surprises me that there would be so many problems left in the code base. It is open source after all.
- reycharles 13y ago> [...] since Knuth highly values the reproducibility of the output of all versions of TeX, any changed version must not be called TEX, TeX, or anything confusingly similar. I have heard that to be the reason that some don't want to "fix" TeX/LaTeX. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#License LaTeX also has a similar clause (or whatever you call it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX_Project_Public_License#Unique_features_of_the_license http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX_Project_Public_License#Un...
- dbaupp 13y agoTo be clear, it is allowed to be called a TeX if it passes a testsuite: > To enforce this rule, any implementation of the system must pass a test suite called the TRIP test[39] before being allowed to be called TeX
- emillon 13y agoI don't think that there is any particular problem in the code base. Its design, however, has been made with 1970s constraints in mind. A lot of people have thought about rewriting (parts) of TeX, but the amount of legacy is so high and you have to keep compatibility with lots of existing user code.