[OS X TeX] Re: The microtype mystery

[Herbert Schulz]

On Aug 20, 2010, at 4:56 AM, Martin Costabel wrote:

> Josep Maria Font wrote:
> []
>> Again, a very large increase factor! The preamble of the document is:
>> \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
>> \usepackage{fixltx2e}
>> \usepackage{amssymb,latexsym}                         \usepackage{amsmath,amsthm}
>> \usepackage{bm}                 \usepackage{enumerate}
>> \usepackage{mathtools}
>> \usepackage{url}
>> I will e-mail the files privately to Robert. 
> 
> Here is another data point, obtained by playing with your preamble.
> 
> From my own experiment, I would suspect the interaction of microtype with the latexsym or similar packages:
> 
> I took some random article of mine (46 pages; if others want to repeat this experiment, the latex sources, two files, are publicly available here: <http://arxiv.org/format/1002.1772v1>). Then I inserted after the \documentclass line
> 
> \usepackage{microtype}
> 
> and then \usepackage{latexsym}, or alternatively just the following two lines from latexsym.sty:
> 
>  \DeclareSymbolFont{lasy}{U}{lasy}{m}{n}
>  \SetSymbolFont{lasy}{bold}{U}{lasy}{b}{n}
> 
> These two lines do absolutely nothing visible, as far as I can tell. But here are the timings from
> 
> time pdflatex CoDaNi_2010_art1
> 
> on my MbookPro core2duo:
> 
> Original file:
> user	0m1.835s
> 
> With just the two lines from latexsym.sty:
> user	0m1.909s
> 
> With \usepackage{microtype} alone:
> user	0m8.591s
> 
> With \usepackage{microtype} plus the two lines from latexsym.sty:
> user	0m49.910s
> 
> This is a factor of roughly 5 for microtype alone, and of 25 for microtype+latexsym. The extra time is spent in raw computing cpu time, no system calls or disk activity.
> 
> -- 
> Martin
> 

Howdy,

Interestingly, the amssymb package---which loads the amsfonts package---appears to have all the symbols that latexsym contains so there is no need for the duplication and the speed difference is obvious. Am I wrong here?

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)