isaac@goanna.oz (Isaac Balbin) (11/03/89)
Why would one prefer one over the other? I have used xdvi and found it fine. One special attraction was the fact that I didn't need to have a translation of all my fonts in terms of X fonts. Which one is faster? more functional?
grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (11/03/89)
Although translation of the fonts to X format is tiresome, a very complete set of 85dpi BDF-format fonts will be shipped with the X11R4 version. On my pmax, these take up 1324Kb. That's not much space, in my book, because typical applications take up 400Kb and more. It's too bad there isn't a compact, machine independent format for X fonts; that 1324Kb may be paid several times for different servers. The features of Texx2 include the following (features that I don't think xdvi has are marked by +, others by *) * view files at a variety of scales (typically two, `large' and `small') * keyboard commands to goto pages (in texx2, these use the TeX page number, not the sheet number) + mark pages & print marked pages + customizble interface using action procedures -- e.g., adding ``print this page'' as Ctl-T was simple + reopen the same or different document from the control box + view multiple pages at once + tpic support (view tpic/texpic output) + psfig support (draws bounding box to indicate placement) + speed the last point is the most important; because texx2 uses fonts, you use many less server calls (particularly since the recent bug I fixed). Typically, each call to the X server displays a word in the document. Also, from looking at the X server font code, I think that fonts are more space efficient than the bitmaps used in xdvi, because the entire font is loaded into contigious memory, avoiding malloc fragmentation. It's difficult for me to judge the performance on my DECstation 3100, because it's fast for everything, but it's very fast. The font thing is the only annoying part. I'd like to finish off the ``PK fonts in the X server code,'' but won't even think about it until R4 comes out. At that point, you'll still need another set of fonts (e.g. 85dpi fonts), but all servers could use the same format. There are also other geegaws I was planning on adding, but haven't done so because there's not reasonable menu package that lets you invoke action procedures (yet).