[comp.sys.amiga] A neat configuration for AmigaTeX + partial solution for zoo problems

cthulhu@athena.mit.edu (Jim Reich) (05/11/89)

I've been playing around with AmigaTeX for quite a while, and aside from a few
of the inherent problems of LaTeX (is there *SOME* way to actually force it
to put a figure where you want?  \figure[h] is not strong enough!), I think
it is reasonable to say it is overall the best program on the Amiga.  Only
problem is that it tends to be kinda diskbound.  Setting out to fix this,
I came up with a neat configuration for 2.5+ Meg, 2 floppy systems, which
gets AmigaTeX running blindingly fast.

Rather than keeping the font cache on the pk directory of the TeX floppy, put a
zoo'd version there, and on boot, unzoo it into a 600K FFS RAD: -- not only
does this make TeX run FAST, but zoo compression nearly doubles the number of
fonts you can keep on the TeX: disk... you will need a script (I call mine
updatepk) which re-zoos the rad:pk directory and copies it to TeX:pk... it
takes a while to run, but you only need to do it when new fonts get copied
to the cache.  Unfortunately, I don't have my startup & scripts handy, but
if anyone has too much trouble figuring it out, send me mail...

Hey, Tom -- what would be really neat would be a mod to TeX which allows it to
read compressed .tfms from the cache... keep the real ones on the color disks,
though, for compatibility...

Along the way, I also came up with the partial answer to one question:
In article <8904300253.AA09616@jade.berkeley.edu> CRONEJP@UREGINA1.BITNET (Jonathan Crone) writes:
>I know that you can use ZOO to archive an entire directory
>heirarcy....
No, as far as I can tell, zoo only supports one level of wildcarding (i.e.
you can zoo TeX:pk/*, but not /*/*.  To make two levels work, use the
LFORMAT option of the list command to create a script which runs zoo on
each SUBDIRECTORY of pk, so, for example, your file would do:
	zoo {options} TeX:pk/118x112/*
	zoo {options} TeX:pk/68x47/*
... and so on.

Three levels, anyone?  I think there may be some way to do it using Matt
Dillon's shell's 'echo */*/*' and feeding that list to zoo, but remember,
you need to feed it full directory names of each file...

					Good luck,
					-- Jim
					   cthulhu@athena.mit.edu