[TxMt] LaTeX formats

Juan juanfc at lcc.uma.es
Mon Feb 5 00:40:27 UTC 2007


El 04/02/2007, a las 22:42, Charilaos Skiadas escribió:

> On Feb 4, 2007, at 4:21 PM, Juan wrote:
>
>> 	Thanks Charilaos
>>
>> probably you have never used dumped preformated nor perhaps LaTeX  
>> at all.
>
> I am actually one of the maintainers of the LaTeX bundle, and using  
> LaTeX for more than 7 years now on a daily basis. But I have never  
> had the need to learn about .fmt files at all. Also, a google  
> search for "dumped preformated" or even "latex dumped preformated"  
> does not really return any meaningful results, so are you sure you  
> are using the right terminology? The LaTeX Companion doesn't seem  
> to have much info on these fmt files either. So I doubt this is  
> something that an average LaTeX user sees in front of them.  
> (Probably because most of them are happy with latex.fmt or whatever  
> the default one is.)
>
> You are right though that i have never used dumped preformated,  
> whatever they are. Anyway, moving on,
>


	Ok, Charilaos

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

	%&format
	% Author: me
	%...

	\begin{document}

	\end{document}

this came from the very first times of tex and is of course used by  
TeXShop, OzTex, and my terminal Tcl scripts ;)





>> This could justify that you didnt' never seen any first line like  
>> that
>> 	%&format
>> as you can see, %& are the initial characters.  They must be at  
>> the first line and since many years (OzTeX and previous) did hep  
>> to change formats and avoid complex usepackages at the start of  
>> your latex sources
>>
>> TeXShop, OzTeX and many others recognize that "format" like the  
>> format.fmt file it must use in
>>
>> 	pdflatex -format format  source.tex
>
> We should be able to make this change easily, I'll try to find some  
> time this week to fix this on the subversion version of the bundle.
>
>>>> Another good thing it should do could be to retypeset it until  
>>>> no warnings and rebuild bibtex... etc.
>>>
>>> Bundles -> Latex -> Help. Look at section 2.2 about Using latexmk.pl
>>
>> 	If you typeset for first time a source.tex, there are no aux,  
>> log, etc, files there and it is very easy to recognize that  
>> situations and then retypeset one or two times more until all the  
>> Table of Contents were correctly updated
>
> But most of the times you are already typesetting a document you  
> have typeset before, so the absence of such files is not a very  
> good indicator that a recompile is needed, especially if things  
> like TOC don't need to be created. In any case, my point is that by  
> telling TextMate to use latexmk.pl as per the instructions in the  
> help file, it will compile the required number of times as you want.
>
> And of course, you can always provide for it your very own script  
> to do the compiling as you want it.


	You are wright, not every latex doc need to produce .toc files and  
then it is more difficult to discover that.  You need to make a first  
typesetting, if no previous .aux and now is there one a second one  
will be necessary, and if no previous .toc file and one now appears,  
a third one will be necessary.  In the meanwhile, you also will need  
to watch .bbl files from bibtex that should be run if some .bbl  
appears, etc.







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