I have fairly large Latex document with a lot of TikZ figures inside. I have a habit of frequent recompilation and it takes forever to compile it using pdflatex. Figures in TikZ take most of the time.
My question is what is the best way to split the document into separate tex files (figures/chapters) to achieve separate compilation of figures and chapters, separate chapter pdfs, and a whole document pdf file ?
Have you tried compiling each picture on its own and then including them in your tex file as pdf rather than the tikz code? You can use the package standalone so that the picture will be the exact size you need. So :
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz,pgf} %and any other packages or tikzlibraries your picture needs
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
%your tikz code here
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
The good thing about this is that you can either include the compile this document directly to get a pdf figure to include in your document, or you can use the command \input to include it in your main document as a tikz code by adding
\usepackage{standalone}
in your main document (together with the tikz packages and libraries), and then
\begin{figure}
\input{tikzfile.tex}
\end{figure}
There is a possibly better way (imho) to cache tikz-pictures. Add the following lines in your
preamble:
\usetikzlibrary{external}
\tikzexternalize[prefix=i/]
After a pdflatex-run you'll see all pictures in the subdirectory ./i .
If you update the code of a tikz-picture simply throw away its corresponding pdf-file and it will be regenerated. For more info see the manual of PFG/TikZ section 32.4 Externalizing Graphics
and possibly 32.5 Using External Graphics Without pgf Installed.
How about putting each chapter in a separate file and then using \include to put them into some master file? Then you can use \includeonly to only compile the chapter you're currently working on. That should save some time at least.
I expect some sort of makefile based solution would be even better than this, but I don't know anything about makefiles...
The way I generally do this is to apply Latex to just part of the file: Emacs and several other Latex editors allow you to compiler regions: with Auctex, you can run TeX-pin-region to specify the current chapter, and then TeX-command-region to run Latex on the selected region.
The traditional way to do this is cut parts of the big file into smaller parts that are \included, and then either comment out parts you don't want to work on, or put some macrology at the beginning and end of each file that allows them to be compiled separately.
Related
I'm using Matlab to get figures from data produced with Fortran calculations and I was wondering if it's better to produce them directly with Matlab (I use the .pdf format) or export them with Matlab2tikz and then process them with the tikZ/pgfplots packages directly on overleaf. Of course I need a very good graphical output and the overleaf compilation to be fast.
A solution that allows both perfect graphical output and fast compilation is to export your graph with Matlab2tikz, compile it separately in a standalone documentclass, like this:
\documentclass{standalone}
...
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
...
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
and then include the resulting .pdf in your main document with:
\includegraphics{mygraph.pdf}
You don't have to compile your main document twice for this, of course you have to compile the standalone document before.
As samcarter already said in their comment, the advantage of having TikZ is that you can have the same fonts as the rest of your document. So your document will look high-quality.
The disadvantage is that compilation time gets longer if you have a lot of TikZ pictures and compile them directly in your document.
I have a "project book" which uses LaTeX's \documentclass{report} ("report" is like a more compact version of \documentclass{book}). I would like to include into this book an appendix with the Doxygen-generated API documentation for the software in the project.
I have achieved this by setting Doxygen's config options LATEX_HEADER and LATEX_FOOTER to an empty file. This makes the resulting latex/refman.tex have top level commands like: \section{\-Namespace \-Index}, at which point I can wrap this with a top level document like:
\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{doxygen.sty}
% the "import" package helps to find Doxygen files in the latex/ subdirectory
\usepackage{import}
% [...] title page and the rest of the book
\appendix
\chapter{API reference (generated by Doxygen)
subimport{latex/}{refman.tex}
% [...] final stuff
\end{document}
This works reasonably well and I get doxygen.sty with this special doxygen invocation:
doxygen -w latex /dev/null /dev/null doxygen.sty
One problem is that this puts an "autogenerated" header on the entire document (not just on the doxygen appendix). I can get rid of this by editing doxygen.sty (I also rename it for my inclusion, actually) and commenting out the block that starts with % Setup fancy headings.
At this point I have something I can live with, but I would like to go one step further: the "doxygen" style modifies a lot of other aspects of the LaTeX document style, and I like it less.
So my question is (in two levels of excellence):
What would be a minimal set of LaTeX commands to put in a doxygen.sty file that would nicely render the doxygen appendix but not interfere with the rest of the LaTeX document?
Even better, has someone come up with a way of doing
\usepackage{doxygen_standalone}
% [... until you need doxygen]
\begin{doxygen}
% the stuff you need to insert your auto-generated doxygen API docs,
% for example the \subimport{latex/}{refman.tex} that I showed above
\end{doxygen}
This last approach is one I would consider very clean.
I'm hoping there is a really simple answer, such as "this already exists in doxygen.sty as an option, and you missed it!"
rename doxygen.sty to mydoxygen.sty, then modify it by inserting
\newenvironment{doxygen}{... most of doxygen.sty goes here ...}{}
I always like my figures to be placed in between text as opposed to the top or bottom of the page. I also like to talk about the figure before it is shown. So I am trying to have something like this:
By looking at Figure~\ref{fig:VCO} you can see that blah blah blah.
\begin{figure}[h]
\caption{VCO test circuit}\label{fig:VCO}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9\columnwidth]{figures/VCO_circuit.eps}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
This doesn't seem to work because it I guess it is referencing something that hasn't occurred yet? Does anyone have some simple solution? I am still very new to LaTeX.
Generally LaTeX needs at least two passes to resolve all its references, the first time to write them to an auxiliary file and the second time to put them into the final ps/pdf/dvi file. So it does not matter where the reference is.
A third pass will be needed, for example, if your document has a long table-of-contents which will screw up page numbers.
It failed the first time because labeling and referencing are a two-pass process. The first time you processed your latex, all the labels were being indexed so the ref failed. The second time around, since the labels had been indexed the ref knew what it was actually referencing.
I would add that latexmk (link) has proven invaluable to me over the years. This is a LaTeX "build" script written in Perl that is designed to compile .tex source files the right number of times. It parses the output from the latex command and performs dependency checking to ensure that the output document is kept up-to-date with the minimum number of passes. It can also deal with BibTeX bibliography files. Generally speaking, I invoke latexmk from either an Ant or GNU Make makefile and treat it just like I'm compiling C++ code, for example.
I had same problem and I found this solution:
\graphicspath{{images/}}
\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.jpg}
\makeatletter
\newenvironment{tablehere}
{\def\#captype{table}}
{}
\newenvironment{figurehere}
{\def\#captype{figure}}
{}
\makeatother
\begin{figurehere}
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{2-14aGa-Sur.jpg}
\caption{Hliněná destička s mapou severu Mezopotámie}
\label{fig:Ga-Sur}
\end{figurehere}
\graphicspath{{images/}} is there to declare your path to your pictures
\DeclareGraphicsExtensions{.jpg} is there for declare picture extension (multiple can be with comma (I think ;-))
\makeatletter
\newenvironment{tablehere}
{\def\#captype{table}}
{}
\newenvironment{figurehere}
{\def\#captype{figure}}
{}
\makeatother
is there for precise determination of position here
\begin{figurehere}
\includegraphics[height=5cm]{2-14aGa-Sur.jpg}
\caption{Hliněná destička s mapou severu Mezopotámie}
\label{fig:Ga-Sur}
\end{figurehere}
there is your picture with height specified and caption and label with it...
I hope it will help you ;-).
I'm going to be taking a ton of lecture notes, and then compiling them into LaTeX so that I can have excellent documents for future me to look over. I'm trying to organize things so that I can have a bunch of little documents containing the notes from a lecture, and then compile them at the end of the semester into one large document containing all of them. I have used import/include etc. successfully in the past, but I've had to remove the content at the head and foot of the sub-documents before compiling the main document. For example, I would have to remove:
\begin{document}
and
\end{document}
from every sub-document before compiling the main document. This is fine for a report with 5 or so sections, but a pain in the ass for something with 100+. Any recommendations for ignoring the contents of a LaTeX file programmatically when using the import command?
I see two approaches here. Either carefully structure your documents, or use some hacky TeX magic:
The smart way
Break your smaller documents into a header part, a footer part and a content part.
header.tex:
\documentclass{article}
...
\begin{document}
footer.tex:
\end{document}
foo-content.tex:
In this paper, we discuss an new approach to metasyntactic variables...
foo.tex (the small paper version):
\include{header}
\include{foo-content}
\include{footer}
In your .tex for the collected articles document:
\include{foo-content}
The hacky TeX way
Put this in some common include file, used by your individual files:
\ifx\ismaindoc\undefined
\newcommand{\inbpdocument}{\begin{document}}
\newcommand{\outbpdocument}{\end{document}}
\else
\newcommand{\inbpdocument}{}
\newcommand{\outbpdocument}{}
\fi
Use \inbpdocument and \outbpdocument in your individual files, in place of \begin{document} and \end{document}. In your main file, put in a \def \ismaindoc {} before including or importing anything.
Here's another possible approach: if you put magic strings (i.e., "% % BEGIN LECTURE % %" ... "% % END LECTURE % %") in the individual files, you could awk out the guts of the individual files, assemble them using make/sh, and then \include them.
There's another hack you could use, which wouldn't require modifying the individual files... just temporarily redefine the {document} environment (to something benign, i.e. a no-op), \include the individual files, and then restore the {document} environment definition.
If I recall correctly, the commands to do this are \let and \renewenvironment.
Hm. You might also have to temporarily redefine \documentclass and \usepackage, too. It's a hack, yes, but I think it should work.
I haven't used it, but it looks like the "subfiles" package does exactly what you want:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Modular_Documents#Subfiles_package
I am not sure if this question is suitable for superuser instead, but I'll ask anyway.
Currently I'm writing on my documentation for my final project. I must append several other LaTeX documents as enclosure. They must be mentioned in the first Table of Contents as alphabetical appendix. I tried the package subfiles, but the subsequent TOC´s are always empty exept in case of translating them alone.
Is there any other way to append multiple full documents with there own documentclass??
subfiles is a very simple package - it doesn't try to do anything other than manage the document-level macros. You will need to issue an \appendix cs before each inclusion of a subfile.
Beware of the different latex documents sharing auxiliary files: if they do this, then subfiles will basically not work - you will be better off using the pdfpages package that absz mentions.
Postscript If you want the subsidiary documents to have their own tables of contents, you have either to change their auxiliary files (at least, their .aux and .toc files), or switch to another mechanism. Maybe minitoc will fit better?
Couldn't you strip out the preamble of the other LaTeX documents and then use \include or \input depending on whether you want pagebreaks?