[NTG-context] distributed / parallel TeX?

[Aditya Mahajan]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Hans Hagen wrote:

> 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.
>
> often there are ways to optimize the document style

In Latex, there is a package called mylatex, which allows you to create a 
format consisting of your preamble. Then you can call latex with your own 
format and this speeds up things.

This approach did not provide a significant speed improvement in latex for 
me, and I don't know whether it will do so in context. Hans and Taco, do 
you think that creating a personal format and possibly also dumping some 
font related info could provide a tradeoff between processing speed and 
disk space?

Aditya