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Comment by denzil_correa | Hacker News Reader

> What's peculiar about latex is that its compilation model is ridiculously inefficient. There's no separate compilation, so you have to re-run the whole compilation at the tiniest change.

Is there a scope for LaTex to have "delta compilation"? This is particularly required if you make presentations using LaTex (Beamer). The whole recompilation process is pretty painful once the number of slides (which includes transitions) go past ~20. Currently, there are some "workarounds" for it, but it would be nice if such a feature exists.

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I use https://www.writelatex.com/ where I have a 17 pages (pdf) of math exercices, and I don't know how they deal with it, but apparently they manage to make incremental "recompilation process", because when I make an online modification on the Latex code, the modification appears almost anstantaneously on the preview pdf aside the code !

You are lucky. I am working on a ~80 page report and it takes 40 seconds for a new word to appear.

I'm astonished by that time number. I have a 400 page book, with a 150 page answers to exercises that is emmitted as part of the book compilation and then compiled on its own. I use a simple shell script that compiles each twice (for the cross-referencing). It takes perhaps 10 secs on my five year old middle of the road laptop. Are you remaking complex drawings each time? What is the performance sink, I wonder?

Sorry, it seems like there was a misunderstanding. It takes this on writelatex.com, not my local machine. There it's a normal 7-8 seconds. Just text and about 50 png/jpg images.

My workaround to cut down compilation time is splitting up the document into parts and always only compiling the part I'm working on.

I have tried a similar work around but it turns a bit messy if you are in the paper publication business (which I am). Camera ready copies (final publication) sucks the remaining "work around motivation" out of you.

In case people don't know, there's a built-in command to do this: \includeonly.

I am not sure if they are doing an "incremental" process. From what I understand, they have a real time preview which compiles the document in the background.

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