[OS X TeX] preview on TS

[Richard Seguin]

> On Dec 30, 2014, at 10:01 PM, Michael Sharpe <msharpe at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 30, 2014, at 12:41 PM, Josep Maria Font <jmfont at ub.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> On 30/12/2014, at 19.35, Gary L. Gray <euler at psu.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>>> On Dec 30, 2014, at 11:41 AM, George Gratzer <gratzer at me.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> May I suggest that today, with fast computers, it does not seem to make much sense to split the source file up into small chunks (chapters). All my recent books have only one source file, I no longer use \includonly etc.
>>>> 
>>>> You may want to try this, if appropriate.
>>> 
>>> If you have, like me, a textbook that is 800 pages with thousands of figures, breaking up the manuscript into sections or chapters and having the ability to typeset a small subset of the manuscript is essential. On a top-of-the-line 2012 MacBook Pro with an SSD, it takes 64 seconds to typeset the entire thing. It takes a couple of seconds to typeset an individual section from a chapter.
>> 
>> Yes. Sometimes, you are trying to fine tune a small tyepsetting issue and need dozens of trials with very small adjustments, and in this situation being able to typeset only a chapter or a section is really helpful. Also, when building complicated presentations with beamer, with overlays and other nice features which demand retypesetting the same frame again and again, beamer's ability to typeset only a single, or a few frames, is very helpful.
>> 
> 
> I find that TeXShop's fairly new feature Edit->Experiment can be very useful in such matters. Rather than prescribing the particular frame to typeset from the beamer document preamble, select the frame to edit, copy it to the Experiment window and press its Typeset button until you get a satisfactory result, then copy back to the main document. (The Experiment window uses the same preamble as the main document.) This is of course useful not just in beamer---it's a big help when typesetting a messy group of equations within a large document.
> 
> Michael

I just tried the “Experiment” feature and realized how useful this is for working on large documents. It does complicated commutative diagrams as well, i.e. xy-pic, which you might have to re-typeset over and over ( … ) until you get the syntax right and the design just right. The much shorter typeset times saves a lot of time and frustration.

Richard Séguin