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.