Incremental build of large document

Question

I am working on a document (using the scrbook class, if it is relevant) which will end up consisting of lots of text and a large number of tikz figures. Even when writing the very first chapter, I notice that running pdflatex, bibtex and makeindex takes a considerable amount of time. I expect this to become worse (i.e., even longer) when the amount of text and figures increases.

I already structured my document into a number of files, since, during writing, I often make changes to only one part of the whole document (e.g., one chapter or one part of the appendix). Is there any way to reuse the files generated by pdflatex during the last run to get a preview of the updated document (without having to wait for the document to be rebuilt completely)?

I would be fine with things like the TOC not being updated. My current toolchain and editor are set up on both, Windows (MiKTeX) and Linux (TeX Live), but I could live with being limited to one of the two platforms. My highest priority is to reduce the build times required for previewing.

Answer 1

I am not aware that pdflatex or other latex programs can do incremental compilation, tikz can cache the created images by using tikzexternal, from the manual:

50.4 Externalizing Graphics

\documentclass{article}
% main document, called main.tex
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{external}
\tikzexternalize % activate!
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node {root}
child {node {left}}
child {node {right}
child {node {child}}
child {node {child}}
};
\end{tikzpicture}
A simple image is \tikz \fill (0,0) circle(5pt);.
\end{document}

The method works as follows: if the document is typeset normally, the library searches for replacement images for every picture. Filenames are generated automatically in the default configuration. In our case, the two file names will be main-figure0 and main-figure1. If they exist, those images are simply included and the pictures as such are not processed. If graphics files do not exist, steps are taken to generate the missing ones.