TeX, LaTeX and Friends

user202729

2:49 AM

How long would a typical 13-page document compile with XeLaTeX? Mine took 4s

Feels abnormally slow?

That is without precompiled preamble. Perhaps it could be made a little faster, although I doubt the preamble is the problem (no significant packages)

mickep

7:40 AM

@user202729 I guess it depends on the document and on your computer...

Paulo Cereda

8:18 AM

@egreg oh no

CarLaTeX

@egreg I stayed in Florence with some American friends recently. They asked a Spritz and a cappuccino (drinking order: Spritz and cappuccino) as aperitivo. Imagine the face of the waiter...

egreg

8:58 AM

@CarLaTeX I guess that, according to them, the best thing in piazza della Signoria is the Biancone. ;-)

CarLaTeX

9:24 AM

@egreg Maybe :)

Paulo Cereda

11:09 AM

twitter.com/who_shot_jgr/status/1451950264001433611

David Carlisle

@user202729 define"significant packages" tikz is slow, pgfplots is slow, graphic[sx] might be slow depending on the graphic format, loading fonts might be slow depending on the font and font type. But speed of the computer is the main thing, I remember a time that 15minutes per page was acceptable and 4s for a document would have been unimaginably fast, but the computers were slower then. with the tree pages of sample2e I get over 2s so 4s for 13pages doesn't sound too bad

$ time xelatex sample2e
This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999993 (TeX Live 2021) (preloaded format=xelatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./sample2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-06-01> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2021-10-18>
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/02/12 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-xetex.def

mickep

11:21 AM

@DavidCarlisle It is also nice to have a few seconds to sip on the tea.

David Carlisle

@mickep yes @egreg can sip on his cappuccino in the afternoon while checking for % at ends of lines

enthu

12:01 PM

0

Q: Run the codes in posts with a button

Recently I saw a post on StackOverflow in which a code snippet could be run by pressing a button. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44380104/c-drawing-scatter-plot-on-ms-charts It was indeed really helpful. I brought the link in TeX/LaTeX chatroom and I found that David Carlisle has already de...

Pablo González L

1:39 PM

$ time xelatex sample2e
This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-0.999993 (TeX Live 2021) (preloaded format=xelatex)
restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/sample2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-06-01> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2021-10-18>
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/02/12 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-xetex.def

@DavidCarlisle not so slow :D

Marcel Krüger

2:06 PM

% time lualatex sample2e
This is LuaHBTeX, Version 1.13.2 (TeX Live 2021)
 restricted system commands enabled.
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/sample2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-06-01> patch level 1
 L3 programming layer <2021-10-18>
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/02/12 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/home/marcel/texmf/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-luatex.def) (./sample2e.aux)

@PabloGonzálezL ^ I prefer faster engines :P

Paulo Cereda

2:27 PM

paulo in ~ at ravenna
➜ time pdflatex sample2e
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.23 (TeX Live 2021) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(/opt/paulo/applications/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/sample2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-06-01> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2021-10-18>
(/opt/paulo/applications/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/02/12 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/opt/paulo/applications/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))

@MarcelKrüger @PabloGonzálezL ^^ I agree :D

David Carlisle

2:51 PM

@PabloGonzálezL but I am happy to pay the time penalty to use from cygwin

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle Jejej, clearly the winner is the old school dvi mode

$ time latex sample2e
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.23 (TeX Live 2021) (preloaded format=latex)
restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/sample2e.tex
LaTeX2e <2021-06-01> patch level 1
L3 programming layer <2021-10-18>
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2021/02/12 v1.4n Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-dvips.def)

@DavidCarlisle To all this, I read your comment above, I know that the machine on which TeX runs is directly related to the speed of compilation, but some years ago lualatex (@MarcelKrüger) was much slower, it has to do with the libraries with which it is programmed or the language itself?

Marcel Krüger

3:11 PM

@PabloGonzálezL Since the other engines generate PDF, a fair comparison would require to include the DVI to PDF conversion too. (As far as performance comparisons running on completely different systems can be described as fair...)

Pablo González L

@MarcelKrüger Hehehe...it's true :D, Don K must have thought that DVI would be the format of the future?

Alan Munn

6

Portugoose.

David Carlisle

@PabloGonzálezL it was. There was no common page description language just printer specific codes for each printer so dvi then a dvitoxxx driver program for each printer solved a lot of problems. Joachim give a nice talk at a TUG meeting (2015 I think) where he showed a system printing thousands of simple documents in a commercial setting (bills of some sort) and he used a custom plain tex format and a custon dvi driver and it was orders of magnitude faster than using pdflatex)

@AlanMunn Jantar

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle I think you want to lose the 'r'

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle Ohhh, I didn't know that, it's way before my time :D

David Carlisle

3:18 PM

@PabloGonzálezL tex is older than PostScript and a lot older than pdf

@AlanMunn never argue with infallible Oracles

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle Indeed, both are possible. :)

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle And at what point in history did .doc take over? I've been using TeX since college and up to that point I thought the only thing that existed was .doc (which everyone else was using).

@PauloCereda cyberduck.io ^^

David Carlisle

@PabloGonzálezL I have never used Word (well perhaps a couple of documents when forced) but people used word processors (word perfect, the famous amstraad dedicated word processing computer and other systems before Word came out in in 1983 so just after tex

Alan Munn

@PabloGonzálezL .doc took over roughly in concert with the rise of the IBM PC in the early 80s. TeX was always in the academic domain, and typically ran on mini computers, or things like Sun workstations. So it's not surprising that it never took off generally.

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle Ohhh, I get it, I was born in 1981 and computers arrived around 1995 (in my school there was only 1 and the teacher only let you look at it :), and that was the boom of windows 95, only in college I came to know TeX (and Linux :D)

Alan Munn

3:29 PM

@PabloGonzálezL Although in the early days of the PC, WordPerfect was probably more used than Word, but gradually Word took over.

Pablo González L

@AlanMunn If I remember correctly, win95 came with something called Wordpad and with that you would have WordPerfect files (if you didn't have the 7 disks to install it).

David Carlisle

@PabloGonzálezL windows still comes with wordpad, it's actually not from the Office team or directly releated to Word, it's a simple gui around the low level text libraries provided by the Windows kernel

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle Ohhh...I thought it was one of those things that was no longer present...I still remember printing a .doc on a dot matrix for a 15 page paper and then going to bed only to realize the next day that there was a paper congestion :(

Plergux

7:14 PM

@AlanMunn LOL

Joseph Wright

10:16 PM

@AlanMunn WordStar on CP/M before that

WordStar was ... fun in a way

@AlanMunn WordPerfect then AmiPro then Word, I'd say

Alan Munn

@JosephWright Oh right, I forgot about that. My first papers at university were probably written using Wordstar.

@JosephWright Although the first real PC I owned was a Mac Plus, so I must have used MacWrite or very early Word on that.

@JosephWright I don't think I've even heard of AmiPro! So it certainly wasn't used much where I was.

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