[OS X TeX] (OT?) TeX and MacOSX (or what we should pretend from OSX applications).

[Claus Gerhardt]

I don't agree with Massimiliano's claim that the computer power of 
todays Macintoshes is unnecessary for our usage of tex. For typesetting 
more complex documents fast machine are desirable and the upcoming 
Flashmode will certainly be more enjoyed by users of dual Macs. Only 
the mere previewing of already existing pdf or dvi files requires less 
computing power than those available.

Claus

On 03.12.2004, at 11:27, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:

> Dear all,
>   Once I used the adjective "ugly" to qualify the output of a DVI 
> viewer for MacOSX. I should admit that no DVI viewer whatsoever 
> (MacDviX, mxdvi, xdvi) have an ugly output, indeed they output quality 
> is almost the same and everdybody was satisfied by using xdvi under 
> Unix or (I think) MacDvi under OS8-9. So I would like to make public 
> excuses for that.
>
> The following is a "manifesto" for a better TeX support under OSX: (it 
> is long so if you want you can just skip...)
>
>  I feel a lot unsatisfied by DVI viewers and even by PDF viewers for 
> what concern the rendering of TeX's output on OSX. Apple computers 
> have a price which is not comparable to other kind of machines and OSX 
> is not free as Linux. From my point of view using a PowerBook G4+OSX 
> like a Mac SE + OS8 or like a PC+Linux is just a waste of money. The 
> computational power of G4 or G5 machines is amazing but this power is 
> not used in our current TeX applications or viewers. So we compile and 
> look at results at (almost) the same speed or quality of my PC+Linux 
> of some year ago (using X11+mwm....). Currently available native DVI 
> viewers draw fonts on screen bypassing the operating system which is 
> again a wast of money. Quartz (the graphics engine of OSX) is 
> optimized for the hardware and to use the vector unit inside any G4 or 
> G5 processors. As so it should be the natural candidate to implement 
> output rendering. If people can post-process entire movies on the Mac 
> why we shouldn't be able to look at our pages faster?
>
>  I think that a common effort in understanding how to render TeX fonts 
> natively under OSX would make OSX the best TeX platform around. (and 
> this cannot happen using code written for other operating systems). 
> This is not restricted to dvi output. Using the Quartz PDF machinery 
> to look at pdf output is also a waste of computational resources since 
> pdflatex embed fonts (to have device-independent pdf). The best way 
> would be to force pdflatex not to embed fonts (so output is smaller, 
> no font subsetting is necessary and fonts can be loaded once for all 
> in the viewer). All this should have as a result that we can hope to 
> modify sources and see the output almost immediately.
>
> Just realize how inefficient are our current setups....
>
>
> Massimiliano
>
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>

--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>