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We have showcases of beautiful works using LaTeX. We have talked about beautiful tables, beautiful thesis, beautiful page headers, even beautiful labels.

I am curious to know, what is the largest work that has been handled using LaTeX? Those with the most number of pages are the obvious choices. But perhaps we will also want to consider to ones with most number of illustrations.

Here are a few toppers that I could find.

  1. TikZ (PGD) Manual, 1161 pages, impressive number of graphics.
  2. Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein, 1312 pages, many line drawings.
  3. Light and Matter by Ben Crowell, 1032 page, many line drawings and photos.

If possible, please answer in elaboration, with the related stories, motivations, obstacles, and preferably links.

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Masroor
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    Does pgfmanual.pdf count? – Manuel Mar 02 '16 at 01:02
  • @Manuel With 1165 pages and many many graphics that one is a strong candidate. Let us see if we have bigger ones. – Masroor Mar 02 '16 at 01:14
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    I have an exercise book (with solutions and an index) from one of my friends with 1,955 pages. No graphics, though. – Bernard Mar 02 '16 at 01:16
  • Can we go for answers with links? In early nineties, in my graduate laboratory, the emacs manual was the mammoth one which took minutes to compile. – Masroor Mar 02 '16 at 01:18
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    The physics textbook here is very large with lots of graphics. http://www.motionmountain.net/ The author discusses his experience with Latex here. http://www.motionmountain.net/onlatex.html – James Mar 02 '16 at 02:47
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    Very large "work" (+oo pages!): Typesetting the entire Song That Never Ends. ;-) – Paul Gaborit Mar 02 '16 at 15:43
  • I somewhere read that Deutsche Bahn has employed TeX/LaTex to typeset their time tables for decades. Maybe they also use (well, used, don't know if this thing is still available in paper) it to typeset the printed railway guide ("Kursbuch")? I remember these things only from the 80s, but they consisted of several thousand densely printed pages. – Daniel Mar 02 '16 at 15:44
  • Could we please get complete answers with the related stories, motives, obstacles, and if possible links? – Masroor Mar 02 '16 at 15:50
  • And… what about this post, which lists book whose sources are available ? – Clément Mar 02 '16 at 16:35
  • @james, and the author complains about missing external tools in LaTeX, and says it is dead as of 2000. Go figure. – vonbrand Mar 02 '16 at 16:53
  • @PaulGaborit We want to talk about published work. :-) – Masroor Mar 03 '16 at 00:30
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    Printing documents over 1000 pages gets difficult/expensive and is probably limited to 2000 pages. PDF has an implementation limit of ca. 1m pages. I remember a bug fix by DEK in TeX that fixed the production of dvi files with more that 64k pages... – Martin Schröder Mar 08 '16 at 21:23
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    The stacks project https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/download/book.pdf has currently 7114 pages. – Watson Jan 05 '21 at 20:28

4 Answers4

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The perhaps biggest document set with LaTeX, that I am aware of is Christoph Schiller's Mountain Motion collection. It consist of 6 volumes, with 566 + 376 + 430 + 286 + 442 + 456 = 2556 pages in total.

Another extensive work, entirely typeset in TeX is Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. Without the supplemental material the volumes 1-4A amount to 650+20 + 762+14 + 780+14 + 883+16 = 3139 pages in total.

Henri Menke
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The longest document I know of is the Erco catalogue from (now with a broken link) Showcase of beautiful typography done in TeX & friends answer of Stephan Lehmke. It was a mindblowingly dense document but he uses his own system Docscape (again based on TeX if I'm not mistaken). If not or if Stephan wants to write his own answer, let me know and I can delete this

2016 version of the document is here to get an idea how it was. More examples are in his website.

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percusse
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I create the SAS/STAT User's Guide complete with output tables, graphics, mathematics, bibliographies and two indexes.

Currently it comes in at 10,425 pages.

Tim A
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    ...is there a link? – Werner Mar 08 '16 at 19:27
  • Wow. What's the runtime for a complete build from a clean directory? – Martin Schröder Mar 08 '16 at 21:24
  • Looks like I need to use those new emoticons available in social networking sites to express my feelings after seeing the page count. Already asked, but is there a link? And perhaps you would like to elaborate the answer a bit with the related stories, motivations, obstacles. – Masroor Mar 09 '16 at 00:09
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    I'm sure no one really prints it and probably no one downloads it either--we provide the chapters as separate pdfs. But the book is really built as a single book. It takes about 30 minutes for a single pass of pdflatex. The link for the most recent published version is here, the second link on the page: http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/stat/index.html Separate procedures pdf/html are in their own pages, like this one: http://support.sas.com/rnd/app/stat/procedures/aceclus.html By the way, these docs are authored in LaTeX and converted to DocBook XML to create HTML. – Tim A Mar 09 '16 at 19:52
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In a single volume. Not much will top: "The Art of Electronics"

Over 1200 pages and it's dense. Small margins, 12pt text, double column.

Typical page:

Art of electronics Sample p622

The authors testify it had "1,905 pages of marked-up text, ... a few thousand index entries,... 1,500+ linked figures and tables." https://artofelectronics.net/preface/

Joseph Wright
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EdL
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