[tex-live] Re: LaTeX enhancement

[George N. White III]

david.boerschlein at pb.com wrote:
> We have the TexLive distribution., which appears not to have the source 
> code for the latex command.
> 
> We are in need of an enhancement to the LaTeX command-line so that it 
> will read a list of tex filenames from either STDIN or disk and, for 
> each filename in the list, create a DVI file without forking and execing 
> each time. We have 80,000 tex files to process for a typical run to 
> create 80,000 dvi files. Alternately, we could give it the name of a 
> directory and expect latex to process all the tex files in the directory.
> 
> We have the C expertise to make such an enhancement.

Do you really want to use LaTeX for this?  LaTeX carries a lot of 
overhead that makes like easier for writers, but I suspect those
80,000 tex files are being generated by some program.  In your place
I'd be looking at writing a minimal macro package as well as the
suggestions to combine files and split the .dvi later.  Is .dvi really
the final format?  Processing .dvi to PS or PDF is not easy -- I think
dvips has more lines of code than tex, and dealign with fonts is never
simple.