[OS X TeX] Textures Announcement

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 9 mars 06 à 23:00, Gary L. Gray a écrit :

>>> 9 March 2006: Textures® for OS X, Rosetta and Universal
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> We know that many are interested in the performance of the Intel  
>>> platform, so we report these times for native Textures to compile  
>>> the 494 pages of The TeXbook: 1.33 seconds (G5 @ 2.0GHz); 1.1  
>>> seconds (MacBook Pro @ 1.83GHz).
>
> I have been cynical about its release, but those speeds certainly  
> do pique my interest, especially if they quickly come out with a  
> universal binary version (I am PowerPC no longer...).

Well, here on a PowerBook G4 @ 1GHz with gwTeX:

> $ time tex texbook.tex
> This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.5)
> [...]
> Output written on texbook.dvi (494 pages, 2030580 bytes).
> Transcript written on texbook.log.
>
> real    0m6.239s
> user    0m3.617s
> sys     0m0.252s

So that Textures on a MacBook Pro would represent (if user time is  
the right time to look at) a speed gain by a factor of 3 to 4. Sure,  
that's impressive, but 4s anyway doesn't appear that long to me.

That said, I'm still looking very much forward to Textures, partly  
out of brand loyalty, partly out of liking for its bare-bones GUI,  
and partly for its way of making TeX files look like real Mac files  
(a single file containing input and output, rather than a group  
of .tex, .dvi and .log files). I hope they did use the OS X bundle  
mechanism to extend that philosophy to OS X, by replacing the  
resource fork mechanism they used in Classic.

Regarding speed, the only TeX program that feels really slow here is  
XeTeX. Given that this limitation comes AFAIK from the system calls  
it (or rather its xdv2pdf companion) does when generating PDF output,  
I wonder what its speed will be like on a MacBook Pro when an Intel  
version becomes available (I know than Jonathan Kew, its developer,  
is working on a Linux version, so that an Intel Mac version might not  
be the priority right now).

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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