All right, I was looking for a problem with LaTeX, which happens to be a system that I admire greatly. The files I meant are partly the .aux, .log etc but also having to create a .tex file to process. It is not as nice as keeping it all in memory and there is a bit of cleanup involved too.

All said LaTeX may well be the way I go although I will of course take a good look at all ideas offered here.

I understand your concern, having a bunch of files lying around is not quite as elegant.

However such a 'problem' is ripe for abstraction into a module. Create some methods to create, store and fetch pdf files, and hide all that LaTeX magic externally.

Even better, make the file generation work for you. The .dvi file that LaTeX generates can be used again and again. Do some simple date checks of your source file against that of the .dvi file and you effectively have an efficient cache.

We use such a thing here in a billing system. Statements are generated and stored on the disk. The .tex, .txt and .ps files are all stored. When someone wants to reprint or reshow the statement, it fetches the appropriate .txt or .ps file. If it doesn't exist, it regenerates them from the .tex file.

In that way, whenever we are short on disk space (or if we want to minimize the amount of files we are moving from machine to machine during a hardware upgrade :-), we just nuke everything but the .tex files, and everything still works, if more slowly.

 - ask

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ask bjoern hansen, http://ask.netcetera.dk/   !try; do();