Speeding up LaTeX compilation

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts... Apparently, the nice todonotes package that I used dragged Tikz along with it, and introduced a major slowdown. Switching to simple marginpars gave a nice speedup. It should be noted that this package is a performance Trojan horse.

large documents start with pages >500 ... Create a script which runs:

pdflatex -draftmode file
bibtex file # or biber
makeindex file.idx # if needed
makeindex -s style.gls ...# for glossary if needed
pdflatex -draftmode file
pdflatex file

The compilation can now be speedup if you run bibtex/makeindex/... only when there were changes in this area. Can be detected with a diff for the auxiliary files.

I think the most effective way to save time is to avoid compiling the document time and time again. Compilations are often not really needed, when we change several words or a simple equation.

For large documents, we can split them into small pieces using \include command. Then \includeonly helps us to compile the only piece we are interested in, leaving the whole compilation to the last stage.

For complex tables or graphs made by TeX, put them into seperate TeX files first to verify the code, then add them to the document.

Sometimes compilation options may affect the speed. pdflatex -interaction=batchmode foo is often faster than pdflatex foo, this avoid scrolling informations. There may be more, say, xelatex -no-pdf foo is faster than xelatex foo, if it isn't the last round.