[TxMt] LaTeX formats

[Adam R. Maxwell]

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