In-reply-to: <9504071100.AA23328@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> (message from Alex Stark on
 Fri, 7 Apr 1995 11:55:03 CST)
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Date: Fri, 07 Apr 1995 12:16:58 -0300 (BST)
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@CS.MAN.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1.BITNET@vm.gmd.de>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1.BITNET@vm.gmd.de>
Subject: Re: Latex modularity
Status: R

It is alreay possible to build formats by sticking \dump in the
preamble.

Basically you just need to go

initex &latex file

and put \dump in the preamble after the packages are loaded.

This assumes that the packages do not put anything on the main
vertical list (such as \special's) that would not be preserved by the
\dump in the way you would want. (This is one of the main reasons for
the \AtBeginDvi command that was added at Christmas)


The main problem then is that your document must be edited  to remove
the lines
  \documentclass ... \usepackage ... \dump
before it can be used with your custom format made by the above
procedure.

It is possible to make the custom format automatically skip these
lines, so that your document remains a valid latex file, but processes
more quickly with the custom format.

See the file `mylatex.ltx' on ctan somewhere for a file that
implements such a scheme.

mylatex.ltx is rather a hack, but the general idea is sound (and
textures has its own mechanisms for doing something similar, I
understand).

There are, as you say, problems with this approach, validating that
the `custom' format is suitable for a particular document. The above
file just ducks this issue, as I only wrote it off the top of my head
as an answer to a question on comp.text.tex, but someone could make a
more robust version using those ideas.

David