I am LaTeXing my notes for a maths class, and I'm wondering what TeX.SE has to say about tips and tricks that have helped them enter their LaTeX code that much faster. It can be anything from a program to a macro to a seated position / music choice.
[Tex/LaTex] Speedy LaTeXing
compilingfun
Related Solutions
If you know the table widths in advance you can "seed" the data that LT writes to the aux file so that it gets the correct widths first time, that won't speed up each run but means that it doesn't take several runs for LT to converge. (Basically look at the format of the command Lt writes to the aux file, recording the column widths, and put that into the document preamble.)
It's possible that compilation speed is improved a bit if you increase LTchunksize, with modern TeX memory requirements you can probably increase that a lot, so the whole table is processed in one chunk.
If you really know all the widths, and don't need any fancy spanning column behaviour, there is always the option of not using the TeX alignment methods at all and just making each row be a row of fixed-width hboxes. that saves TeX the bother of saving all the data in unset boxes, and working out the column widths.
Of course the time taken depends rather on how complicated the cells are, if you got rid of all the table markup and just set each cell as a paragraph, that wouldn't give the layout you want but would give a limit on the achievable time.
I'm a cofounder at writeLaTeX.
We don't currently use a background daemon. Our backend uses pdflatex on Linux, so I can't say much about XeLaTeX on Windows (but XeLaTeX support is planned), but here's our experience.
The main factor that determines the compile time for a small document is whether the many source files for the packages it uses are already in the linux disk cache. (See http://www.linuxatemyram.com for an overview of the disk cache and some good links.)
That is, the first latex document you compile tends to be slow, because latex has to read all of those files from their various locations on your hard disk. But, when you compile the second document, the operating system has helpfully kept those files in main memory since it read them the first time, so reading them in again is much faster.
I also know that jpallen of ShareLaTeX now maintains the CLSI, which is open source, so you can see how that backend works. I don't think it uses a background service, either.
As far as I can see, the daemon-based approaches in the links you provided still work in principle, but I don't know whether they're still supported.
Best Answer
Assuming you are in a Mac.
I don't know vim (which is one of the most used editors), but I will talk about TextMate. In my case, I can't imagine how could vim be better than TextMate for me (I don't know nothing about programming).
In TM (TextMate), apart from normal input, you have four different kinds of 'entry options'
mat) presstaband then you get what the snippet has in (in this case the full matrix environment and an option to choose betweenpmatrix,vmatrix, etc.). Apart from the text you have options like where the cursor goes and more, but this is basic.a) you press the key combination and you get some symbol previously assigned (in this case\alpha).\begin{X} ... \end{X}(i.e. typeenvironmentwhichidefinedpress the key combination and then you get the full\begin{environmentwhichidefined} \end{environmentwhichidefined}with the cursor in the middle).spress the keys and get\sum_{$1}^{$2} $0, where$iis the places where the cursor goes when you hittab: if you typeskey combinationatabbtabxyou will get\sum_{a}^{b} x).With those commands is pretty easy to be really fast. All the key combinations are configurable, of course. You can create new of any of this different input shortcuts very easy.
In addition, you have a lot of preconfigured commands for LaTeX. Apart from this, you have a lot of commands (like insert new
\item, next cell in a tabular, new column and new row in a tabular, create tabular from selection, etc.). The only thing you have to do is to stay one afternoon looking through all its options (you will get impressed).And, of course, it has a system to save and use preambles, full template documents, etc.
The only thing I believe (but I don't know) vim could be better for me is that may be it supports some extra features in the Find/Replace option, which in TM is the standard and doesn't give you so much flexibility. I miss a good find/replacement system in TM which may be vim could give me (with some little programming).
I do take notes of my lessons (math student) with TM. So, I bet for TextMate (since it's free, I hope this is not considered publicity :P).
PS: I spect some vim users to tell why they use vim. Because I've never tried to learn or discover what vim can do. TM just worked. But please tell the good things about vim.