[pdftex] Caching intermediate compilation results for near-real-time PDF re-renders during editing

[Jamie Vicary]

Hi Doug, thanks for your message. Yes I agree. This does not present
an issue, because the proposal is, when doing a "fast recompilation",
not to read in new values from the .aux file. So the table of
contents, equation references, etc, would not update. If the user
wants to update these, they can trigger a separate full compile. This
is how BaKoMa handles it, and it works very well.

Cheers,
Jamie

On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 7:55 PM Doug McKenna <doug at mathemaesthetics.com> wrote:
>
> For documents with tables of contents, extending a section or chapter title by one word (or even letter) on page N could conceivably increase the earlier Table of Contents by one line, which could conceivably cause the table of contents to require one more page, which then could change the page numbering of every page following in the rest of the document.
>
> This is one reason why Knuth chose fixed-point arithmetic, and TeX's own implementation of fixed-point math, to avoid the butterfly/avalanche effect of even a single low-order bit difference in typesetting measurements.
>
> Doug McKenna