skipping parts in compiling

skipping parts in compiling

[andrea valle]

Dear all,
I'm writing presentations with large image files.
Sometimes I make minor changes (e.g. typos).

Is there a way not to recompile all but only some pages after I made my 
changes?
In presentations I only have separate pages (no index, numebr of pages, 
etc)

Thanks

-a-

Andrea Valle
DAMS - Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione
Università degli Studi di Torino
http://www.semiotiche.it/andrea
andrea.valle@unito.it

Re: skipping parts in compiling

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 2/21/06, andrea valle wrote:
> Dear all,
> I'm writing presentations with large image files.

Do you have images in PDF or in some other format? Including PDF is
much faster than including bitmap images.

> Sometimes I make minor changes (e.g. typos).
>
> Is there a way not to recompile all but only some pages after I made my
> changes?

If you mean "can I recompile only page 3 and 4 out of my 100-page book
and get the whole document" that answer is no I think. But there are
other ways.

> In presentations I only have separate pages (no index, numebr of pages,
> etc)

In such cases I usually split files and include them in a "master
file", so that I can quickly and easily comment things out.

\starttext
\input chapter-one
\input chapter-two
\stoptext

A more fancy way is to use projects/envionments/products/components.
You can then compile separate chapters or all chapters at once without
the need to change a single line in the source. They're described at
the beginning of cont-eni.pdf.

I wanted to ask something about projects/products in a new thread (I
didn't notice how great they are until some days ago), but since I'm
already talking about them here:
Data about chapters, sections, references, ... are written into an
auxilary file and have to be processed first before references,
indexes, TOCs can work properly anyway: would it be possible to have
an option not to process the auxilary files of single products but
those of the master document (ie. of project) when compiling single
products, so that cross-referencing, section numbering, ... would
remain the same as if the whole project was processed together?

Thanks,
    Mojca

Re: skipping parts in compiling

[andrea valle]

Thanks Mojca,
>

> If you mean "can I recompile only page 3 and 4 out of my 100-page book
> and get the whole document" that answer is no I think. But there are
> other ways.
>

I suspected.

-a-

Re: skipping parts in compiling

[Mojca Miklavec]

> > If you mean "can I recompile only page 3 and 4 out of my 100-page book
> > and get the whole document" that answer is no I think. But there are
> > other ways.
> >
>
> I suspected.

Well, you also have
texmfstart newtexexec.rb --pfdcombine | copy | select | trim

I don't know how exactly to use them (to hans: lines 351-359 in
newtexexec.rb, "def copyortrim" seem to be broken a bit - wrong number
of arguments), but I guess that you could combine parts of your
document together again this way (I wouldn't use this approach
however).

But what's wrong with using modular approach (to compile just the
chapter or section you're currently working on, so that it compiles
fast enough and you can fix bugs, and then compile everything together
when you need the whole document)? You don't need to change a single
line if you compile separate chapters or if you compile everything
together. Except that you might need to split the document in separate
files (using projects/products is really a great thing). If you don't
want to split your document, you can also use modes:

\starttext

\startmode[everything]
\enablemode[chapter1]
\enablemode[chapter2]
\stopmode

\chapter{Introduction}

\startmode[chapter1]
\chapter{Chapter A}
\stopmode

\startmode[chapter2]
\chapter{Chapter B}
\stopmode

\stoptext

Then you can compile the document with
    texexec --mode=chapter1 filename
or
    texexec --mode=chapter1,chapter2 filename
or
    texexec --mode=everything filename

Mojca