On May 4, 2011, at 2:38 PM, Pavel Sanda wrote: > Rob Oakes wrote: >> The book I've been working on takes nearly 15 minutes to compile.\
> this looks horrible. what hardware and OS do you use? Not looks, is horrible. But, in LyX's defense, it's a very complicated book and the export time is pretty comparable to what I'd get in InDesign or Scribus. LyX is far superior, though, because this book would be prohibitively difficult in either program. (Probably impossible in Scribus. It would require some significant workarounds in InDesign.) I'm currently working on a 2007 era MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM. But processing times are similar on my Dell Workstation (2006, similar specs). If using the desktop workstation, compile time is about half that. > how many pagesof text and pictures? any external-insets processing? There is about 500 pages of text and pictures. There are slightly more than a thousand separate images (if you add up all the screenshots), and many of them are very large. The document requires Sweave processing prior to running xetex. (Which incidentally is also one of the reasons why it takes so long to compile. XeTeX is generally slower than pdfTeX. I haven't really experimented with luaTeX, so I can't comment on how it compares.) In general, I'm quite happy with how LyX has held up. It takes a long time to compile, but LyX is very stable to work with and has been for months. The only headache is compiling the entire text. But it's worth the tradeoffs. Especially since I can also generate ePub compliant HTML from the same text (yes, I've redefined a couple of things). > does it change with second run when image cache is active? A second run with image cache speeds things up somewhat. But I wouldn't say the result is hugely dramatic, maybe a reduction of 5 minutes or so.
