On Feb 4, 2007, at 16:57, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
On Feb 4, 2007, at 7:40 PM, Juan wrote:
dumping precompiled tex is a very old and useful technique you should try. You only need to bundle all the styles and headers you used to use for making some kind of LaTeX document and after that usepackages.. put
\dump
then you will be asked for the name of the format.fmt file. Put that file in the usual tex searched paths and vuala! you can use it in
pdflatex -f format.fmt source.tex
saving you not only many processor cycles but making your every day documents shorter and cleaner
Of course this means that if you want to send your files to someone else, you need to send them your .fmt file as well, unless you change the files. Is there a way to recover the source that the .fmt file was created from, or do you need to keep it around, and know what is in it in some other way?
It's a good idea, though not one I am likely to use any time soon personally. processor cycles are relatively cheap these days and it's hard to break old habits. Plus, I change my preambles all the time ;)
There was a recent discussion on the Mac OS X TeX list about the fragility of this. Here's another note from the past <http://www.tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/2005-February/013634.html
.
Also, the %&format in the first line of a file is generally disabled, unless you've manually set parse_first_line = t in texmf.cnf or pass - parse-first-line to pdftex. This has been discussed numerous times on the Mac OS X TeX list.
-- Adam