Re: [Texmacs-dev] Long documents

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 address@hidden wrote:
> I wrote a 450 page book (Lie Groups, Springer GTM volume 225)
> using TeXmacs.
>
> TeXmacs is quite slow on book-length documents.

Yes, especially when loading such documents or when making
changes which affect the whole document. Local editing has
been speeded up quite a lot since june.

> Recently I was asked by someone else who had imported a
> book into TeXmacs what to do about the slowness of the
> editor on big documents. I had problems with this so I'm
> curious what the canonical reply should be.
>
> You can break the document into smaller ones which are
> included in the big one using (from the menus)
>
> Insert --> Link --> Include
>
> and then when you revise the smaller documents you
> would run
>
> Tools --> Update --> Inclusions
>
> from the larger document.

Yes, that is the idea.

> But what about cross-referencing? I found when I was
> writing my book that I would paste a few theorems and
> formulas from other sections into the beginning of my
> working chapter, with the labels. Later these would
> be expunged. But this is definitely a little inconvenient.

The idea for the moment (but this should be changed later when
I have time), which I have used for my Lecture Note (which has
just been finished), is to attach a "project" to the individual
chapters. More precisely,

  1) You create a master file with the includes and automatically
     generated material like the table of contents, the index, etc.

  2) For each individual chapter which has been included in this way,
     select "Document -> Master -> Attach" and enter the name of
     the master file.

  3) Assign the variable "chapter-nr" to the number of chapter minus
     one at the start of each individual chapter. The same could be done
     for the page numbering, but I do not care as far as I am concerned.

>From time to time you will have to load and update the master file.
When editing the individual chapters, missing references will be taken
from the master file. Hyperlinks and tab-completion for labels will
also work across the project.

Notice that all this is quite fragile. For instance, if you attach your
file to a non-existing master, then you may be unable to open your file
under certain circumstances. Nevertheless, if you carefully design
a global skeleton of your book once and then just modify the individual
chapters, the system works fine now (individual 20/30 chapters are loaded
in a few seconds on my computer; updating the master file takes about
20 seconds for my Lecture Note of 228 pages).

Best wishes, Joris