[XeTeX] [texhax] Throughput

[Peter Davis]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 11:08 AM, John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com> wrote:

>  Hello
>
> I haven't followed this closely, but it might be worth having a look at how
> you position text randomly on the page (unless you have already, in which
> case apologies).  In pre-XeTeX days I used PSTricks to produce the cropmarks
> and date/time stamp on each page (essentially using \rput to put the
> rules and text at different positions), and old plain TeX processed quite
> large books in just a few seconds.  When I moved over to XeTeX (I still use
> plain) I soon identified PSTricks as the culprit when books began to crawl
> along page by page - so I now typically use Edmac's \cropmarks for the
> cropmarks and the a combination of plain TeX's \smash \raise, and sometimes
> \llap or \rlap for the date/time stamp line, and everything works as
> expected (with a very noticeable slowing down on particular pages if I have
> a few lines of PSTricks code somewhere).
>
> I recall you said at the start that you were using some package to position
> text randomly, and wonder if that is contributing to the processing time.
>

Thanks, John.  I'm not using PSTricks, but I am using textpos to place
blocks of text anywhere on the page.  I don't know what the overhead of that
is.  I'm also looking at using flowfram for similar reasons, so it would be
worth my time to compare the costs.

Ultimately, I'd love to do this all in plain TeX, but I just don't know
enough to do that.  Hopefully in a future version ...

Thanks!

-pd


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