Optimise rendering of multiple copies of the same .svg file

Question

I am using the svg package to include flag emojis as .svg files in my text with \includesvg{}. However, since I need to render a lot of flags which are the same, and each flag takes a lot of time, it hits the Overleaf compile time limit. Is there a way of optimising the rendering of repeats of the same .svg file, so that it doesn't time out? Unfortunately I can't use \emoji as the class file I am using requires pdflatex as a compiler.

\documentclass{article}
% SVG figures
\usepackage{svg}
\def\sweflag{\includesvg[width=1.5em]{flags/se}}
\begin{document}
Sweden is great! \sweflag\sweflag\sweflag\sweflag\sweflag\sweflag\sweflag\sweflag\sweflag
\end{document}

Download for Sweden flag .svg.

In case the exact shape of your image does not matter, you could use https://www.ctan.org/pkg/emoji — samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz, Sep 18 '23 at 14:07
@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz I need to use pdflatex to conform with Elsevier template, otherwise I'd have used \emoji for sure — Toivo Säwén, Sep 18 '23 at 19:05

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 18 '23 at 12:34

Pkg xsavebox might be of help:

time pdflatex --shell-escape swedenXsbox.tex
...
real    0m0.551s
user    0m0.510s
sys 0m0.039s

swedenXsbox.tex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgffor}
% SVG figures
\usepackage{svg}
\usepackage{xsavebox}
\xsbox{sweflag}{\includesvg[width=1.5em]{flags/se}}
\begin{document}
Sweden is great!
\foreach \i in {1,...,600} {\thesweflag\space}
\end{document}

whereas

time pdflatex --shell-escape swedenDef.tex
...
real    0m2.733s
user    0m2.598s
sys 0m0.119s

swedenDef.tex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgffor}
% SVG figures
\usepackage{svg}
\def\sweflag{\includesvg[width=1.5em]{flags/se}}
\begin{document}
Sweden is great!
\foreach \i in {1,...,600} {\sweflag\space}
\end{document}

Optimise rendering of multiple copies of the same .svg file

1 Answers1