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

[Doug McKenna]

At the TUG conference in Palo Alto a few years ago, David Fuchs demoed some interesting experimental cleverness on this subject.  I think it involved quite a lot of low-level hacking in the innards of the engine, though.  Perhaps similar to the BaKoMa project, about which I know nothing.

As someone who has homebrewed his own TeX language interpreter, I've thought a bunch about the right way to (re)design things to solve this and related productivity problems vis-a-vis the edit-typeset-edit-typeset cycle.  But I'm pretty sure to do it "the right way" requires revamping how any such engine handles formats and jobs at a fundamental level, as well as at several other higher levels.

Doug McKenna