[OS X TeX] Is it possible to speed up rendering in TexShop?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 16 Feb 2007, at 11:58 am, Signups wrote:

> Greetings all,
>
> As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I am writing my doctoral  
> thesis in LaTeX.  Currently it is only about 40 pages, but will  
> eventually run to about 200.  A problem that I am running into is  
> that every time I want to render a preview, XeTeX (the engine I am  
> using) has to regenerate *everything*.
> I'm wondering if there isn't some way to speed things up, so that  
> it doesn't take half a minute (or more) every time to produce the  
> PDF.  I have an older Mac (G3 900mhz) so optimizations to speed  
> things up will come in very handy.

If you're able to use the xdvipdfmx output driver instead of xdv2pdf  
(the default in xetex on OS X), this is usually much faster. The two  
are not 100% compatible with each other, but for many documents  
either will work.

To do this (assuming you have a recent distribution that includes  
xdvipdfmx, such as a current gwTeX or MacTeX package), you can create  
a copy of TeXShop's XeLaTeX engine file, name it something like  
XeLaTeX-xdvipdfmx, and edit the script to include the option

   -output-driver="xdvipdfmx -q -E"

in the xelatex command line used.

JK


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