as i lay abed, groaning, the daemon was up and about, and wrote:

The following information was provided by the package's contributor.

Name of contribution: mylatexformat Author's name: Florent CHERVET Location on CTAN: macros/latex/contrib/mylatexformat Summary description: Use mylatexformat.ltx to make a format based on the preamble of any LaTeX file License type: lppl

Announcement text given by the package's contributor:

Use mylatexformat.ltx to make a format based on the preamble of any LaTeX file.

The use of formats helps to speed up compilations: packages which have been dumped in the format are loaded at very high speed. This is useful when a document load many packages (pgf-TikZ among other...)

For the creation of the format use a command line like:

etex -initialize [opts] &pdflatex mylatexformat.ltx abc.tex

mylatexformat.ltx has been primarily written from mylatex.ltx (available on CTAN under the contrib/Carlisle/ directory) but gets rid of many limitations or problems of mylatex.ltx.

More precisely:

• The format is created from the beginning of the file

(usually documentclass[...]{...} until either: ~ egin{document} ~ endofdump if endofdump is encountered in the preamble ~ csname endofdumpendcsname for convenience: to avoid `undefined control sequence' in case the document is compiled without the format.

• egin{document} endofdump or csname endofdumpendcsname can be precedeed or followed by other macros or

commentaries.

• Commentaries in the preamble are ignored (braces are not

required to be equilibrated).

• packages that modify the document macro (like auxhook.sty

or etoolbox.sty) can be included in the format.

• A report is available in the .log file.

I have been using mylatexformat.ltx with MikTeX under: - pdfTeX in dvi mode - pdfTeX in pdf mode - XeTeX

Comments about its use on other system are welcome !

(whew!)

i've installed the new package and created an entry in the catalogue repository for it; thanks for the upload.

Users may view the package catalogue entry at http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/mylatexformat.html or they may browse the package directory at http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/mylatexformat

but the catalogue entry won't appear until some time tonight.

Robin Fairbairns

For the CTAN team