[OS X TeX] TeXniscope speed [was XeTeX sources]

[Geoff Vallis]

I actually find TeXniscope very fast, even on long documents, although 
not quite as fast as xdvi. One thing that seems to slow it down is that 
(when previewing a dvi file) it converts any EPS graphics to PDF 
graphics using ps2pdf. This makes it slower than just using pdflatex 
from the outset. If the PDF graphic already exists, there should be no 
need to do this conversion. Could Texniscope not be made aware of 
pre-existing PDF files and just display them if so?

This issue unintentionally doesn't arise in v0.32, because Texniscope 
can't always follow the path to EPS graphics specified in the source 
document, so it gives up and and moves on! This may be the reason that 
Bruno (I think it was he) could not get Texniscope to display graphics 
properly, when previously he had it working.

However, and needless to say, its a very nice product. After years of 
using xdvi, and trying various other products, I now use TeXniscope 
(along with Joachim's nice tetexcomm package for Alpha, and the two 
make a virtually seamless package).

Geoff




> Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] XeTeX sources?
> From: "Massimiliano Gubinelli" <mgubi at mac.com>
> Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:11:04 +0100
>
> I started to write TeXniscope as a dvi previewer with in mind to have a
> fast viewer (i.e. responsive so that changes to the source can be
> reflected as soon as possible in the preview). This is possible as the
> experience with TeXview (on NeXT, people always report that to be a
> great program) or xdvi (which is very fast, IMO). Unfortunately it is
> not so easy to draw TeX fonts on the MacOSX with good quality (as
> MacDviX e.g. shows). Ideally one should be able to use the intrinsic
> PDF support to draw Type1 fonts directly but Apple does not provide a
> sufficiently rich interface to its PDF rendering engine (as NeXT had
> when working with Display PostScript). My strategy up to now has been
> to hack dvipdfm to be used inside the viewer as an interface between
> the dvi format and the graphics driver but it still require much work.
> For example one of the difficulty is that Quartz does not allow to use
> incremental PDF which would be great for parsing pages as they come out
> from TeX....

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