On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Taco Hoekwater
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