[OS X TeX] Timing

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 22 févr. 06 à 17:15, William Adams a écrit :

> I believe typesetting in TeXshop adds some (negligible?) overhead in
> terms of inter-process communication or some such between the TeXing
> process and TeXshop's display of it (I'm sure someone else will
> provide a more accurate description and terminology).

I remember a time, before OS X, when typesetting a main document,  
which called several other documents through \input or \include, took  
literally minutes in Textures and a few seconds to one minute in  
OzTeX. My analysis was that Textures relied on high-level (and  
sophisticated) Mac OS system calls, checking the integrity of each  
file before opening and closing it, whereas OzTeX was using low-level  
routines, much faster but without such checks.

A consequence was that, for example, on the Macs of that time (around  
1993 or 1994), unpacking the beta then first LaTeX 2e distributions  
(that is, processing the content of the base directory to create  
what's know available pre-digested in the unpacked directory) took  
between 2 to 3 hours IIRC with Textures.

Those were fun times!

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