This LaTeX package provides caching of \includegraphics calls, with several useful effects:

• Recompilations are much faster (10x speedup observed)
• Images can be postprocessed with ghostscript before inclusion, thus:
  • Automatic downscaling to specified DPI
  • Automatic JPEG compression with configurable quality
  • Much smaller files (e.g. 10MB instead of 150MB)!

Note: Due to the one-by-one invocation of pdflatex and ghostscript for each graphics element, the first compilation is typically slower than usual.

Note: graphicscache needs the \write18 call (also called shell escape). This is a security risk if you have untrusted TeX sources.

Compile the package using

latex graphicscache.ins

to generate the file graphicscache.sty, which you should place in your TeX input path. On Unix systems, this can be done by:

mkdir -p ~/texmf/tex/latex/graphicscache
cp graphicscache.sty ~/texmf/tex/latex/graphicscache/
texhash

Or just drop the graphicscache.sty next to your TeX document.

Activate caching with

\usepackage{graphicscache}

and you are finished. Remember to compile your document with -shell-escape, like

pdflatex -shell-escape paper.tex

Most LaTeX editors allow you to enable shell escape in their settings.

Another feature is creating a "release" tarball containing your TeX sources and the downscaled images. Just use the release.sh shell script in your source directory. In this case it is recommended to place the graphicscache.sty file in your source tree, since your release target will probably not have it.

For more information, check the package documentation, which you can generate with:

pdflatex graphicscache.dtx