Re: [NTG-context] distributed / parallel TeX?

On 12/16/2008 3:31 PM, Martin Schröder wrote:

2008/12/16 Lars Huttar :

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- You could design your document *specifically* to make the parts independent, so that the true and authoritative way to typeset them is to typeset the parts independently. (You can do this part now without modifying TeX at all... you just have the various sections' .tex files input common "headers" / macro defs.) Then, by definition, a change in one section cannot affect another section (except for page numbers, and possibly left/right pages, q.v. below).

True. Also with TeX if your paragraphs are independent of each other (i.e. they don't include references to others), they could the typeset in parallel and then handed over to the page builder.

Good point... although doesn't the page optimization feed back into paragraph layout?

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- Most large works are divisible into chunks separated by page breaks and possibly page breaks that force a "recto". This greatly limits the effects that any section can have on another. The division ("chunking") of the whole document into fairly-separate parts could either be done manually, or if there are clear page breaks, automatically.

pdfTeX 1.50 knows about the page diversions (analogue to m4's divert and undivert). They have a lot of potential.

Sounds useful. It's impressive if you can get "a correct table of contents in the first run" (says http://www.gust.org.pl/BachoTeX/2008/presentations/ms/handout.pdf)

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page number of each page reference. If pagination has changed, or is new, this info is sent back to the various nodes for another round of processing.

Hopefully stopping at some point. If you use something like varioref, you can end with infinite circles. :-)

But this is just a problem of typesetting with TeX in general, not particular to parallel/distributed typesetting, right? IIRC, Knuth even says in the TeXbook that a really pathological case might never stabilize. Lars