[OS X TeX] Re: The microtype mystery

[George Gratzer]

By the way, Martin, off topic, I am really impressed by your fellow Swede, 
the journalist Blomkvist. He would have had the courage and tenacity
to solve this mystery, especially, if helped by Lisbeth.

GG


On 2010-08-20, at 10:06 AM, Martin Berggren wrote:

> But the really interesting problem for us outsiders is why this happens...
> 
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 17:02 , George Gratzer wrote:
> 
>> 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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>> 
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> 
> Martin Berggren
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Department of Computing Science, Umeå Universitet
> S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. http://www.cs.umu.se/~martinb,
> Martin.Berggren at cs.umu.se, Ph: +46-90-786 6307, +46-70-732 8111 (cell)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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