[pdftex] Native PDFtricks

[Jens-Uwe Morawski]

On Mon, 15 Jul 2002 14:46:26 +0200
Tobias Haustein <tobias.haustein at aixigo.de> wrote:

 
> 2. MetaPost --> is slow because of external process

Why should this be slower than a LaTeX package that emulates
all graphic operations on TeX-level?

I've tried 100 pie-charts and it takes about 10 sec from
the metapost start until the final document with all 100
graphics included is finished. Is this really a long time?

Depending on the situation you can speed-up the process
a little. The 10-sec-run above needed 4 secs for metapost
and 6 secs for the inclusion/conversion in LaTeX.

A different way is to use texexec from ConTeXt in order
to create a pdf-file that includes all graphics, each
on its own page. (texexec --pdf --fig=c file.*)

Then you can use
\includegraphics[page=XXX]{texexec.pdf}
for the graphics inclusion.
The difference between both ways is, that the
texexec run needs some more time (in my example 14 secs)
but the inclusion in your final document is faster,
i.e. 1.5 secs. 

Thus, if your graphics do not change often (once or twice in 2 mins),
you should consider the second way.

> Question: Is there a package that natively (without calling external programs)
> produces PDF code for _complex_ graphics?

afaik, no.
 
> However, it seems to me, that PDF should
> contain nearly all required operations that are nescessary to implement a
> powerful graphics package for pdfTeX.

quite. But TeX has no support for graphics. Therefore a package has to
implement a whole set of graphic operations. I  don't believe that this
will be faster than a dedicated external process. Or the package will
not have many capabilities, that is useless.

jens