[TxMt] Latex Config and backward compatibility questions

[Robin Houston]

On 31/07/07, Brad Miller <bmiller at 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}

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.

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.

> 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.

Robin