Re: [tip] org-publish to work with (very) large books

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com>]

Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> writes:

> Improving performance and compile time in TeX is an old topic, and there
> are a few tricks here and there. But TeX is what Emacs is, both are
> venerably old; and both are single-thread.

Yet, the information is surprisingly scattered. I was unable to find a
single guide on the available possibilities. Mostly unanswered or
partially answered questions from users.

> There are more ''modern''
> approaches, like Patoline or Sile (of course, based heavily on TeX,
> which is the father of everything). Sile, especially, is very
> interesting and from time to time I like to play with it. The problem
> with these new projects is that they don't have the LaTeX package
> ecosystem, and they are poorly documented. Well, Sile in particular is
> the work of a single person. Links:
>
> https://patoline.github.io/#documentation
>
> https://sile-typesetter.org/

Thanks! This is interesting.

> As for LuaTeX, which is the state of the art today in the TeX ecosystem,
> it is nothing more than TeX + a lua interpreter + the implementation of
> advanced features from previous engines like pdfTeX and the experimental
> Omega/Alef. It has the advantage that it is a scriptable TeX (TeX
> primitives can be controlled by Lua scripts, and truly amazing things[1]
> can be achieved with very little effort[2]); it has the disadvantage that
> the scripting language is Lua. The ideal would have been a Lisp-TeX ;-)
>
> [1] The chickenize package contains many examples, some of them somewhat
> absurd and not very useful in
> appearance: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/chickenize
>
> [2] https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb31-3/tb99isambert.pdf

For me, the main problem with LuaTeX is that it is generally not
supported by publishers I deal with. Mostly, LaTeX is the requirement.
Some even demand Word documents ):

Hence, all the advanced features of LuaTeX cannot be used in real my
real publications and I cannot convince myself to dedicate time for
playing around with LuaTeX.

Do you have anything from LuaTeX in mind that could improve the current
ox-latex pdf export when LuaTeX is used as the TeX engine?

>>> The moment one breaks down a large piece of work into specialized parts,
>>> one gains more control over that piece of work. And org-publish helps
>>> manage all of that. It is about managing a large book as a website (via
>>> org-publish). In short, the combination of org-publish, projectile and
>>> latexmk is quite productive for me in this type of work.
>>
>> This is a bit confusing. You still keep the book in a single giant Org
>> file. It indeed does not mean anything given that we can always narrow
>> to subtree, but I fail to see where you break the book into specialized
>> parts then (LaTeX performance trickery aside).
>
> I think this is inaccurate. The book is split across multiple
> subdocuments. The master file is just the 'outline' of the book.

I see. After watching the video more carefully, I do see the your org
file only had the bibliographies. Not the actual book text.

Best,
Ihor