Kile takes a long time to run PDFLaTeX for my thesis

Question

It takes ~15-30 seconds to run PDFLaTeX for my PhD thesis. This is killing my productivity.

Each included chapter is called, e.g., \include{theory}, and the relevant .tex file starts with the respective \chapter{Theory}.

A single change in one chapter causes PDFLaTeX to rebuild all chapters; this takes a long time. Does Kile have a built-in way to only "recompile" changed chapters, a la make on Linux, so I don't have to wait so long for minor edits?

Details:

• The thesis is only about 100 pages long so far.
• There are some large photos included (necessary for being able to zoom on specific features). The whole pdf is ~12 MB right now.
• Quickpreview returns with errors since I include graphics and .sty files (it works for very small snippets only).
• My project's main .tex file consists of only \usepackage commands, \include statements and a handful of other commands (frontmatter, tableofcontents, backmatter, etc).

If I cannot fix this I will have to make ~5-10 separate projects for different chapters, then concatenate them all at the end. This is undesirable because there are cross-chapter label/references to images and other shared resources across chapters.

Has anybody come across this and solved the problem?

Answer 1

if you think that including the large images is what's taking most time, process just the images and enough surrounding text to make sure they're doing what you want them to do. then add [draft] using one of these methods in the preamble:

\documentclass[draft]{...}
\usepackage[draft]{...}

this will suppress loading and processing of the images, but will leave a space of the proper size in the proper location, with the name of the file printed as a place marker.

remember to remove the draft for the final run, and be resigned to the fact that this run will probably take a long time.

to compile a book piecemeal, a chapter at a time, put each chapter in a separate file, and call them in with \include. then use \includeonly{...} in the preamble to specify which chapter(s) should be processed in a particular run. this will make use of the .aux files for other chapters already processed, so that cross-references will be resolved properly.

Answer 2

If you would like to avoid the draft option of the graphicx package, you could duplicate all your images with lower resolution copies, thus you retain the actual images with their respective sizes, however, due to the lower quality the resulting pdf will be smaller and compiling will probably be faster. During writing you probably do not need the high-end quality of your images, but it is not too bad to have them there instead of the empty rectangles.

• copy your images folder to imagesHighQ
• put low-quality copies of your images into the images folder

When you are done, delete or rename the images folder; and rename imagesHighQ. Run the final compilation.