Quarto rendering pdf, running xelatex 10 times

[jpatteet]

I asked a question on stackoverflow and got an answer that resolved the problem. I am posting both here, maybe it is worth some modifications in quarto or not, let me know what you think.

Question:

I am wondering if it is possible to render quarto document faster.

When I render my document I get these messages in the "Background Jobs" window:

running xelatex - 1
  This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999994 (TeX Live 2022) (preloaded format=xelatex)
   restricted \write18 enabled.
  entering extended mode
  
running xelatex - 2
  This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999994 (TeX Live 2022) (preloaded format=xelatex)
   restricted \write18 enabled.
  entering extended mode
  
running xelatex - 3
  This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999994 (TeX Live 2022) (preloaded format=xelatex)
   restricted \write18 enabled.
  entering extended mode

All the way until:

running xelatex - 10
  This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999994 (TeX Live 2022) (preloaded format=xelatex)
   restricted \write18 enabled.
  entering extended mode
  
WARNING: maximum number of runs (9) reached

Output created:

Does anyone know what those 10 "running xelatex mean ? Is there a way to decrease this number of runs and what is the impact on the final rendering ?

Answer:

Quarto generates PDF via LaTeX by default. The LaTeX processors sometimes require multiple runs, as they step through the document sequentially and need a another run to, for example, update the table of contents after seeing another heading. Usually two runs are enough, but some LaTeX packages require more runs to get the correct output. Ten runs is quite unusual though, there might be something wrong elsewhere.

Quarto uses a heuristic to determine if it needs to run the LaTeX engine once more. Quarto also installs any missing LaTeX packages automatically. However, the tool latexmk is probably better in determining when to do additional calls to xelatex. You can use this tool with Quarto:

---
format:
  pdf:
    pdf-engine: latexmk
    pdf-engine-opt: -xelatex
---

If the document still requires 10 runs, then there might be an issue with a LaTeX package somewhere.

Comment:

I added pdf-engine: latexmk and pdf-engine-opt: -xelatex and now it does not even tell me running xelatex and renders the document very quickly

[dragonstyle]

Thank you for sharing this! Could you share the qmd that causes this? I think it it probably is a bug and I'd love to fix it...

[jpatteet]

I have done the update to 1.3 and I do not get the error anymore. The rendering is not as fast as a few months ago but faster than when I do not use latexmk and xelatex, but I don't know if it is normal or not (1min10 for 40pages with lots of images)

[dragonstyle]

OK this is good news. Previously, when using the latexmk engine with Quarto, a lot of the Quarto functionality itself was being disabled (not intentionally, but due to a bug). I have a feeling that enabling that functionality likely accounts for the performance different (even if you're not using those features, we are still doing things like running filters over the document and post processing that LaTeX where we wouldn't have been previously).

[cscheid]

@jpatteet When your thesis is ready to be publicly available, would you consider making the sources publicly available as well? We're interested in tracking performance issues in Quarto and would love to know if there are places where we can easily improve.

[jpatteet]

Yes when I am done with my thesis, everything will be publicaly availabe online.
As I am still not familiar with Rstudio and Quarto and commonly struggle with various aspects such as formatting. Do you know where is the best place to ask questions about this ?

[cscheid]

We have a good bit of documentation on this. https://quarto.org/docs/get-started/authoring/rstudio.html is a good entry point to using RStudio, then the "Authoring" section in https://quarto.org/docs/guide/

If those don't address your issues, asking in the discussion forums here is the next step.

[mcanouil]

Closing this as resolved and in favour of #3518