On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com> wrote:

>
> Hi Lars,
>
> Lars Huttar wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> We've been using TeX to typeset a 1200-page book, and at that size, the
>> time it takes to run becomes a big issue (especially with multiple
>> passes... about 8 on average). It takes us anywhere from 80 minutes on
>> our fastest machine, to 9 hours on our slowest laptop.
>>
>
> You should not need an average of 8 runs unless your document is
> ridiculously complex and I am curious what you are doing (but that
> is a different issue from what you are asking).
>
>  So the question comes up, can TeX runs take advantage of parallelized or
>> distributed processing?
>>
>
> No. For the most part, this is because of another requisite: for
> applications to make good use of threads, they have to deal with a
> problem that can be parallelized well. And generally speaking,
> typesetting  does not fall in this category. A seemingly small change
> on page 4 can easily affect each and every page right to the end
> of the document.
>

Also
3.11 Theory of page breaking
www.cs.utk.edu/~eijkhout/594-LaTeX/handouts/TeX%20LaTeX%20*course*.pdf


-- 
luigi