[OS X TeX] TeXShop/teTeX speed using TeX+ghostscript

[William Adams]

If this is a dupe, my apologies, I'm not seeing my response.

Warren asked:
>Using TeXtures, it would take about 1-2 seconds for a change in the  
>source to appear in the typeset window (no antialiasing). In TeXShop,  
>this takes about 7-10 seconds on a 500 MHz G4 (the TeXing takes about 2
 
>sec). I realize that the antialiasing and ghostscript conversion takes  
>time, but it seems that the discrepancy is too large. Does anyone have  
>any suggestions?

Textures uses IPC (inter-process communication) as developed for NeXT's
TeXview.app, so can display as soon as the system generates the current
page---by contrast, TeXShop has to wait for the entire document to be
written out as a .dvi, then for dvips to make a .ps, then for
GhostScript to convert that into a .pdf. (and using a pipe is always
slower than accessing memory already allocated to an app).

Using a RAMdisk may speed this up somewhat, but Textures has a huge
advantage, which even switching to pdfTeX won't overcome.

Jonathan Fine had Dr. Art Ogawa give a presentation on one system which
uses IPC (and dvichop?) at TUG 2000---well worth looking that up if one
is interested in the underlying technical stuff.

William

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