[luatex] LuaTeX precompilation

[Henrik Mannerström]

Thank you all for an enlightening discussion!

As it seems this can't be done from within luatex, you can always add
another layer of indirection! Alex expressed exactly what I wanted
"minimize the latency from hitting the compile button". Since I
already use Make to run my latex jobs, some shell-scripting won't hur
right? ;) Below is a proof-of-concept tex-server. You give it the
tex-sourcefile you are targeting, and it will run an infinite loop
that starts lualatex, pipes it the source file up to the line with "%%
end preamble" and then waits until a file "sourcefile.tex.resume" is
created, piping the rest of the source after that. Very crude and
simple, but it works. The main reason why I did it like this is that
it requires almost no change to the original source file.

texserver.sh:
#!/bin/sh
# texserver

while true
do
    texsplit.sh $1 | lualatex
    mv texput.pdf ${1/tex/pdf}
done

texsplit.sh:
#!/bin/sh

sed -e '/%% end preamble/q' $1
while [ ! -f "${1}.resume" ]
do
    sleep 0.05
done
rm "${1}.resume"
sed -e '1,/%% end preamble/ d' $1