On 7/31/07, Robin Houston <robin.houston@gmail.com> wrote:
On 31/07/07, Brad Miller <bmiller@luther.edu> wrote:
> Here's my real world example for you then :-)

Interesting situation; thanks!

There is a kludgey workaround: write something like

\include{myheader} % <- includes \begin{document}

Cool, that gets me past that hurdle.
 

The string '\begin{document}' is taken to indicate the end of the
preamble, even if it's in a comment. That's intentional, precisely to
permit this kind of workaround; though perhaps it would be prettier to
also recognise a special comment "% End of preamble" or some such.

> How hard would it be to solve this problem the brute force way and just
> provide a flag that would have the script recompile the whole document.

I'm inclined to say, if that's what you want then Watch is not the
tool you are looking for, since you won't get any benefit from it. If
you do want to use Watch in such a situation, it is not hard to
implement a workaround as described above.

You may be right.  I've been perfectly happy using the latex & view command and having Skim set up to auto update when the file changes.  Plus, I have to do bibtexing and makeindexing a fair amount in my documents.

But, since I dove into it to add it to the branch and move it into the Latex bundle, you are the victim of some of my random thoughts along the way. :-)

Of course ideally I'd like it to work without the need for a special
workaround. When luaTeX is properly released (in about a year, if it
goes to plan), I think I could implement a reasonable solution using
that.

luaTeX interesting...  Would you use lua to replace some of the stuff that is written in TeX today?

> I wonder whether precompiling the preamble really saves you that much time for
> most documents on modern hardware??

All I know is that it saves an awful lot of time for my documents on
my hardware. I wouldn't have bothered to write it otherwise! Do you
not find that it does for yours? I know my Powerbook G4 is getting on
a bit.


On my mbp  It takes about .75 seconds to typeset a 30 page chapter, which includes about 25 different packages.  I don't even find that time noticeable given that I have to switch focus to a new window.

Brad


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--
Brad Miller
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Luther College