[texhax] Large Project

[Vladimir Lomov]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 22:16:42 -0500, Patrick M. Rutkowski wrote:
> My project has gotten large enough that when I run "!tex" in my bash
> shell it takes quite a while before I'm looking at the resulting PDF.
> This gets rather annoying, since I'm new enough to TeX that I really
> do have to be constantly looking at the output of every line as I type
> it, line by line (for fear of accruing too many syntax mistakes).
I assume that you use latex instead of tex. Also I advise you to use
pdflatex which will produce pdf while latex gives dvi.

> How the heck do people go about writing 20+ page projects in TeX?
Focus on content of a document not on the syntax. The set of neccessary
commands are small enough (text emphasizing, formatting environment, greek
letters access and maths evironments). So just type and if you do an
error in syntax latex will complain when it will be run on document.
Check the document syntax go on. After some time you will do less errors
than in beginning.

See, fo example "Not So Short Introduction into LaTeX".

> Another issue is that I'm using epsf.tex from CTAN to include
> postscript figures in my document, and that really slows things down
> even more.
Don't use it. Just don't use it at all. There is graphics bundle and
graphicx package for (pdf)latex. Use only it.
See
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=impgraph

-- 
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.