[TxMt] Latex Config and backward compatibility questions

[Brad Miller]

On 7/31/07, Robin Houston <robin.houston at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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}


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
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