[texhax] Large Project

[Schwartz, Steven J]

Patrick

Here are some ideas that may help:

1. Split your tex source into pieces in separate files. Then use  
latex's \include and \includeonly commands to only typeset portions of  
your document. Each piece will start in a new page but that may be ok  
- and at the end when you're ready you can change thr \include to  
\input to noon it all up

2 split into separate file pieces and \input them. For testing  
segments comment out the \input s you don't want to see. This may give  
some undefined references butaybe that doesn't matter

3.  Define a new command to temporarily skip segments of text eg  
\newcommamd\skiptext[1]{} then take the text you want to skip and  
surround it with braces ie

\skiptext{
...... text to skip
}

When you want to see it either remove this or

\renewcommand[1]\skiptext{#1}

Again cross-references will be unresolved. I use this often especially  
when generating presentations using Beamer which can slow things down

4 do a one-time conversion of all your figs to PDF and use pdflatex  
with the graphicx package. If you include the graphics without it's  
suffix pdflatex will find the PDF versions so they can live in the  
same directory. There are lots of ways to do this depending on your  
operating system. I would use epstopdf if you start from eps files or  
ps2pdf or pstopdf from ps files. Pdfcrop will trim off any White space  
borders although epstopdf does a good job most of the time. Other  
tools can do this operation. If all else fails write a tiny latex file  
that will do it in the way you currently do ie using epsi or whatever  
then trim the whitespace using pdfcrop or the trim options in the  
\includegraphics[trim .....]{myfig} command. (note myfig and NOT  
myfig.pdf)

HTH

Best
Wishes for the new year
Steve




-----------
Steve Schwartz
Space and Atmospheric Physics
Imperial College London
Tel 020 7594 7660

On 23 Dec 2009, at 03:26, "Patrick M. Rutkowski" <rutski89 at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> My project has gotten large enough that when I run "!tex" in my bash
> shell it takes quite a while before I'm looking at the resulting PDF.
> This gets rather annoying, since I'm new enough to TeX that I really
> do have to be constantly looking at the output of every line as I type
> it, line by line (for fear of accruing too many syntax mistakes).
>
> How the heck do people go about writing 20+ page projects in TeX?
>
> Another issue is that I'm using epsf.tex from CTAN to include
> postscript figures in my document, and that really slows things down
> even more.
>
> Any advice?
> -Patrick
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