Xy-pic User's Guide

1.7 Speeding up typesetting

One thing that you will notice is that Xy-pic is sometimes slow in typesetting diagrams (this is to be expected considering the number of drawing operations performed as reflected by the number last in each xymatrix message). If you followed the rule of starting all entries with a (nonexpandable) character or { then you can insert the declaration

\CompileMatrices

in the preamble of your document: this will create temporary files containing compiled versions of each matrix that can be loaded very quickly; they are automatically recreated when a matrix is changed.

If this causes some diagrams to not work, then such compilation can be explicitly switched off by using \xymatrixnocompile in place of \xymatrix. Compilation can be switched off completely with \NoCompileMatrices (which respects TeX grouping as does \CompileMatrices, by the way).

And if you are still not satisfied with the speed then you can add the following:

\OnlyOutlines

which will omit all compiled pictures; the additional command \ShowOutlines will add a dotted rectangle outlining the size of the picture.

 

Xy-pic User's Guide