Latex provides a draft-mode as an optional argument to the document class, having two main effects on the whole document.
Draft is an optional argument of the document class and is therefore used as follows
\documentclass[draft]{...}
The two main effects mentioned before are:
- Marking overfull hboxes (no line-break within the margin) by a vertical line, helping to locate overfull hbox warnings. This affects text, but also figures and tables.
- Embedded images are not displayed in the generated PDF. Instead only an outline including the file path is shown.
A similar effect as the latter can also be achieved by drafting the graphicx package (\usepackage[draft]{graphicx}).