[OS X TeX] Textures vs. TeXShop typesetting speed

[William F. Adams]

On Saturday, April 3, 2004, at 07:04  AM, Charles Bouldin wrote:

> The question for you, if you can still do this: Typeset the same large 
> document with Textures under classic and TeXShop. Either a TeX or a 
> LaTeX document would be fine. Tell the list the relative speeds. The 
> last time I checked (which has been well over a year) Textures was 
> -much- faster. If that is still the case, that is very strange, 
> because it means that the Textures typesetting engine running under 
> classic is faster than a native Unix TeX (teTeX).

I believe this is a matter of perception.

Textures is able to display a page as soon as it's finished processing, 
even while the remainder of the document is still processing in the 
background. I believe its also able to determine if a change will only 
affect a single page, in which case only that page is processed. 
TeXshop has to wait until a complete .pdf of the entire source is 
generated --- if you're using TeX + Ghostscript that's a full .dvi 
compile cycle _plus_ dvips processing time _plus_ conversion to .pdf, 
but even w/ pdftex that's processing the entire file, reading in and 
embedding all of the graphics as ``form'' objects and embedding all of 
the non-core fonts.

For a fairer comparison, go to the last page of a Textures document 
which is straight text and time its compiling from scratch.

NeXT's TeXview.app had a similar capability to display a page while the 
remainder of the document was processing, as does Preview LaTeX for 
emacs. Both of these rely on IPC (Inter Process Communication) --- I 
believe you can check the dvichop source for details on how Preview 
Latex does this.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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