On 5/28/13 2:48 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:
Another option is buying a real big hard disk, start the document with \tracingall (top of file), have a coffee break (or take a walk, or read tex-by-topic), locate the log file, find an editor that can load this beast and start deciphering what happens in there. Best take a real document, with proper font usage and lots of structure, lists and referencing as well as some interactive features.
Good, I've just loaded it and it's like looking at a compiler's chain of substitutions... on steroids (17K lines).
Looking at the hash is rather useless as figuring out the expansion chain is non trivial (comparable to reading assembler, cpu instructions or bytecode). Looking at a traced log at least gives an impression of what *happens* which is a good first step.
Well, I do that, I write also in assembly and it's not that bad! As I said elsewhere, a static version is also interesting.
I will get deeper into latex source code!
