[OS X TeX] Re: The microtype mystery

[George Gratzer]

I just woke up that my problem is solved!

> 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?

First, Herb you are wrong. My recollection is that latexsym defines about a dozen symbols
that amsfonts does not. It seems, however, that I do not need any one of them. So I commented out

\RequirePackage{latexsym}

in the sty file and here are the results:

without microtype:

real	0m2.604s
user	0m2.534s
sys	0m0.067s

with microtype:

real	0m7.172s
user	0m7.103s
sys	0m0.062s

PERFECT!

I am really grateful for your help Martin and Herb. Ido not know how you came up
with the idea that latexsym could be a factor. To me it was only a definition
of a dozen commands...

I will report soon what these times are like with the new iMac.

GG







On 2010-08-20, at 7:41 AM, Herbert Schulz wrote:

> 
> 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)
> 
> 
> 
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