[OS X TeX] Textures vs. TeXShop typesetting speed
William F. Adams
wadams at atlis.com
Sat Apr 3 09:19:07 EST 2004
On Saturday, April 3, 2004, at 07:04 AM, Charles Bouldin wrote:
> The question for you, if you can still do this: Typeset the same large
> document with Textures under classic and TeXShop. Either a TeX or a
> LaTeX document would be fine. Tell the list the relative speeds. The
> last time I checked (which has been well over a year) Textures was
> -much- faster. If that is still the case, that is very strange,
> because it means that the Textures typesetting engine running under
> classic is faster than a native Unix TeX (teTeX).
I believe this is a matter of perception.
Textures is able to display a page as soon as it's finished processing,
even while the remainder of the document is still processing in the
background. I believe its also able to determine if a change will only
affect a single page, in which case only that page is processed.
TeXshop has to wait until a complete .pdf of the entire source is
generated --- if you're using TeX + Ghostscript that's a full .dvi
compile cycle _plus_ dvips processing time _plus_ conversion to .pdf,
but even w/ pdftex that's processing the entire file, reading in and
embedding all of the graphics as ``form'' objects and embedding all of
the non-core fonts.
For a fairer comparison, go to the last page of a Textures document
which is straight text and time its compiling from scratch.
NeXT's TeXview.app had a similar capability to display a page while the
remainder of the document was processing, as does Preview LaTeX for
emacs. Both of these rely on IPC (Inter Process Communication) --- I
believe you can check the dvichop source for details on how Preview
Latex does this.
William
--
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com
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