[OS X TeX] Re: Editors: Advantages and disadvantages

[Marcus Michalsky]

On Sep 18, 2006, at 5:18 AM, Richard Seguin wrote:

> BBEdit definitely helps on older machines in terms of speed. I'm  
> using an old 550 MHz Titanium Powerbook with no L2 cache. BBEdit  
> opens and manipulates documents much faster than any other editor  
> I've used, including TextMate, and is very satisfying on this  
> machine. On the other hand, the 117 page (and growing) math  
> document that I'm working on right now takes over 20 seconds to  
> compile to PDF, and I'm starting to dream of something faster in my  
> future. Does anyone here have any experience with LaTeX and a Mac  
> Mini? I'm going to have a difficult time resolving the Powerbook /  
> Desktop-with-larger-monitor choice.

Yes, I use a Mac Mini 1,42 GHz G4 with 512 MB Ram. I've installed TeX  
from the i-installer and
use iTeXMac. Before i used a PowerBook G4 12'' 1GHz with i-installer  
and TeX-Shop.

The machines both work great. I've written some large documents from  
lectures in the university.
Many math, some images, multiple documents (\include{...}). They have  
about 60-100 pages each.
Also i built a presentation using the beamer class (73 slides with  
many images, xy etc.).

What should i tell you about speed :-( Well, it works ;-)
In my opinion it is very fair. I dont remember so precisely, but i  
think it was faster than 20 seconds.
I don't know exactly, but if you make includes and only change one of  
them, the compiler only works on this file then ?

Slow is the Mac mini on large Databases and Virtual Machines like  
Java...
Now i program a web application with JSP, tomcat and MySQL. When you  
start the database, server and some editors plus browser it is quite  
slow. But on Tex you have only editor and preview... thats way better...

I only plan to buy a new Mac Mini because of getting Leopard, new  
iLife and Dual Core ;-)
but for TeX Reasons the old one is very good.

On Editing i am not so familiar, because I want to be portable. I  
wrote on the same TeX Projects
on my Powerbook (Panther), Mac Mini (Tiger), in the university on  
Debian with vim and sometimes (not often) on a Windows machine of  
friends , when they need help on TeX.

Vim is available on  all these machines, but on  the mac i use the  
iTeXMac, but not very deeply with all its functions. If you want you  
can send me your project and i compile it with a stop watch ;-)

>
> Richard Séguin------------------------- Info  
> --------------------------
> Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
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>

------------------------- Info --------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
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