Re: [NTG-context] Parallelizing typesetting of large documents with lots of cross-references

On 3 Dec 2020, at 12:04, Stephen Gaito wrote:

1. Are there any other known attempts to parallelize context?

Not that I know of, except for the tricks I mentioned in my earlier mail today.

2. Are there any other obvious problems with my approach?

The big problem with references is that changed / resolved references can change other (future) references because the typeset length can be different, shifting a following reference to another page, which in turn can push another reference to yet another page, perhaps changing a page break, et cetera. That is why the meta manual needs five runs, otherwise a max of two runs would always be enough (assuming no outside processing like generating a bibliography or index is needed). So your —once approach may fail in some cases, sorry. Actually, the meta manual really *needs* only four runs. The last run is the one that verifies that the .tuc file has not changed (that is why a ConTeXt document with no cross-references at all uses two runs, and is one of the reasons for the existence of the —once switch). Depending on your docs, you may be able to skip a run by using —runs yourself. Best wishes, Taco