For others, here's the quote being referenced:
> After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shellshocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-‐Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
So the top-level document is just a long list of inputs
\input{intro}
\input{prelude}
\input{complex_figure1}
...
Writing and editing an entire book manuscript is slow.
For pesky TeX chaos smashups, you create a small dedicated TeX file with necessary driver files, edit-compile-loop till satisfied.
Twenty years ago I ran a makefile producing 1755 pages on a 32 bit INTeL CPU. This was just to see what a fat book would look like, thousands of edits remained, still remain. All the two-column formatting was fine, except for problems of long equations and tables blowing up beyond the column, and other mess I couldn't solve. The compile run time was insignificant.
BTW its laTeX not LaTeX.
Donald Knuth's original creation will ever be infinitely more significant than the sprawling ocean of all the crumpled paper bag shenanigans Leslie and whomever-ephemeral else, RUSTy-paper-clips to the side.
De Laude Scriptorum
We probably could have done it but my coauthor is great with latex and figured converting the whole thing was probably easier than dealing with the political headache of making the organisers deal with a different format.