Working on my phd thesis has become a nightmare since I tried to insert some very large (sideways)tables with many columns and cells all containing citations.
A complete compiling run with latexmk took more than 5 minutes. Before I inserted the tables, it was about 3 minutes which is still long enough.
As the tables contain references (\cite), they can not be handled as "static", as the numeric references might change with changes of the document.
(Otherwise I'd typeset the tables in a separate document and insert the pdf with includegraphics.)
What possibilities are there to speed up compiling?
- Is there a way to exclude parts of a document (similar to
includeonly), so that I could normally replace the tables (which will normally fill an entire page) by a large rectangle?
Sure I could remove chapters I'm currently not working on, but it partially need them for cross-referencing and cross-checking information…
_and sure, I could compile less often, but to avoid mistakes and see what I'll get after small changes, I'd like to compile directly after making changes to the text, if possible.
Any ideas?
EDIT
just an hint, in case someone else should have the same problem:
I tended to compile very often to directly see if my changes in the source document had the wished effect(s) and to avoid syntax error which could be hard to find later. This took me a lot of time.
Since I am using Emacs and auctex now for editing my source document and finally learn to use its features properly, there is the command on region command, which only compiles the selected region and so directly shows if changes have taken effect without compiling the whole document (or large parts of it). :-)
Best Answer
You can use the
draftoption to speed up things a bit, but using\includeonlyis the only efficient solution that I am aware of.Note that it is smarter than you think. In particular, it preserves cross reference. I cannot see any reason why not to use it while you are in the process of writing.