[OS X TeX] Speeding up Flashmode

[Alessio Guglielmi]

Hi,

For many years I've been using with great satisfaction the brilliant Flashmode by Claus Gerhardt: 
<http://www.math.uni-heidelberg.de/studinfo/gerhardt/Flashmode/>.

For complicated reasons that I won't go into, sometimes I need to use TeX + Dvips instead of PdfTeX. Flashmode can do that and it works fine. However, I wonder whether Flashmode could be somehow instructed to use pstopdf instead of ps2pdf for the final leg of the conversion to pdf. The reason one might want to do that is that pstopdf is almost four times faster than ps2pdf (at the price of a bigger file size). Obviously, speed is a very desirable quality for Flashmode and the conversion from ps to pdf takes up most of the rendering time. Even for simple documents the rendering time can be reduced from something like 2 seconds (annoying) to below half a second (reasonable).

I have tried giving the parameter "--distiller pstopdf" to the simpdftex script in the TeXShop preferences but Flashmode is not affected. I am using up-to-date software on a variety of new and relatively new machines.

Any help is appreciated. Many thanks,

Alessio Guglielmi
University of Bath