Speed up latex

Some tips for speeding up latex compile times.

Only compile what you need.

• Normally latex does the following:
  • Compiles bibliography
  • Compiles figures,
  • Runs Cross references.
• When editing text you don’t need it.
• One run of pdflatex is sufficient.

Enable draft mode

• Does not render graphics such as tikz and images

Figures and Tikz

• Figures
  • Add graphics in pdf instead of png.
  • Saves latex some time compiling to pdf.
  • Check the DPI settings of the images
    • Too large is long render time, too low is bad quality.
• Tikz
  • Externalize tikz figures (externalize package)
  • This only rerenders tikz figures when changed.

Compile preamble

• Loading the preamble takes a long time for pdflatex
• Compiling before one significantly increases the compile time.

After the preamble add \csname endofdump\endcsname Then compile the preamble once with:

# Compile
pdflatex -ini -jobname="main" "&pdflatex" mylatexformat.ltx main.tex

# Run the compiled version takes 1.996 seconds (on my machine ;).
pdflatex "&main" main.tex


# Run with defaults takes 4.591 seconds.
pdflatex main.tex