[XeTeX] startup time

[Zdenek Wagner]

pá 3. 7. 2020 v 21:43 odesílatel Michael Maxwell <mmaxwell at umd.edu> napsal:

>
>
> On 7/3/2020 2:28 PM, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> > There are several options:
> >
> > 1. Dump your own format with your styles. You will have to regenerate
> > the format after update of any of these style files and you will have to
> > take care of dependencies
> >
> > 2. Install TeX on a fast disk such as SSD
> >
> > 3. Increase your RAM and use larger disk cache, on my Linux computers
> > the unchanged files can remain in cache for hours
>
> I already have 2 and 3, although afaict 3 has little if any effect,
> because the processing time appears to be taken up with macro expansion
> (or whatever it is that tex does while processing the preamble).
>

If macroexpansion takes a lot of time, you should learn how to write your
own simple macros instead of loading a huge amount of packages. On my
computer I compile a book with 450 pages twice by LaTeX, then BibTeX +
Makeindex (as parallel tasks) and again LaTeX twice and all this takes 25
seconds. Using a specialized format instead of loading the styles would
save less than a second because I rarely need more than 5 packages.

>
> 1 is what I was looking for, but how do you do it?  I tried
>     xelatex -ini <my tex file>
> but it chokes on the \documentclass; or when I try it on my style sheet
> alone, it chokes on the \ProvidesPackage.  Apparently it works with
> plain TeX, but not with LaTeX?  And I'm not sure this would do what I
> want anyway; what it means to "be xeinitix"; a web search for that term
> was unproductive (unless you're looking for some kind of gas warning
> light).
>
> Can you give me a lead on how to do #1?
>


Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
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