

A web built on LaTeX - disgruntledphd2
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/03/20/a-web-built-on-latex/

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claudius
Given how long it takes pdflatex to compile relatively simple files, I’m
rather happy with HTML – and throwing out all the logic that makes pdflatex
take ages would throw away all the beauty of ‘LaTeX’.

Admittedly, though, there are a few things I miss in HTML, \footnote (placed
at the end of the paragraph or so maybe?) being the most prominent one.

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johndcook
I don't know what about LaTeX makes it slower than TeX to compile. I always
use LaTeX rather than TeX so I'm used to the former's speed.

So recently when I compiled a huge TeX document, I assumed the compile had
failed because it returned so quickly -- it seemed to return immediately --
but it completed successfully.

~~~
claudius
I have no experience with TeX ./. LaTeX, but one idea would be that LaTeX is
simply not seen as performance-critical – whether your huge report takes two
seconds or thirty seconds to compile is rather irrelevant if you do that once
or twice a day. TeX being some sort of subset of LaTeX might simply make it
faster due to a lack of features.

On the other hand, people spend ages trying to optimise HTML.

