[OS X TeX] Speeding up Flashmode

[Alessio Guglielmi]

Thank you Claus, it works. I simply opened flashmode-ts-alt-1 with TextWrangler and added the option --distiller "pstopdf" to the simpdftex command. Now the script is more than two times times faster for me. Ciao,   -Alessio

On 11 Aug 2013, at 23:15, Claus Gerhardt <gerhardt at math.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:

> Alessio,
> 
> Flashmode contains three shell scripts which are user accessible and can be altered. Change flashmode-ts-alt-1 to your liking.
> 
> Claus
> 
> 
> On Aug 11, 2013, at 19:51, Alessio Guglielmi <web.alessio.guglielmi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> For many years I've been using with great satisfaction the brilliant Flashmode by Claus Gerhardt: 
>> <http://www.math.uni-heidelberg.de/studinfo/gerhardt/Flashmode/>.
>> 
>> For complicated reasons that I won't go into, sometimes I need to use TeX + Dvips instead of PdfTeX. Flashmode can do that and it works fine. However, I wonder whether Flashmode could be somehow instructed to use pstopdf instead of ps2pdf for the final leg of the conversion to pdf. The reason one might want to do that is that pstopdf is almost four times faster than ps2pdf (at the price of a bigger file size). Obviously, speed is a very desirable quality for Flashmode and the conversion from ps to pdf takes up most of the rendering time. Even for simple documents the rendering time can be reduced from something like 2 seconds (annoying) to below half a second (reasonable).
>> 
>> I have tried giving the parameter "--distiller pstopdf" to the simpdftex script in the TeXShop preferences but Flashmode is not affected. I am using up-to-date software on a variety of new and relatively new machines.
>> 
>> Any help is appreciated. Many thanks,
>> 
>> Alessio Guglielmi
>> University of Bath
>> 
>> 
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>