barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) (05/08/91)
I am considering using PasTeX at home on my Amiga 1000. However,
before I start downloading many megabytes of files, I'd like to know
approximately how fast this program runs.
How many seconds per page (or pages per second?) does PasTeX 1.2
run? At school, I'm used to a speed of 1-3 pages per second.
Dan
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\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/////////////////////////////////////tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns) (05/09/91)
barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) writes: > How many seconds per page (or pages per second?) does PasTeX 1.2 >run? At school, I'm used to a speed of 1-3 pages per second. From memory: running the .tex documents provided with PasTeX and Michael Doob's "A Gentle Introduction to Tex" (about 100 pages) through virtex took between 1 and 2 seconds per page. The resulting .dvi file took _much_ longer to print on my LaserJet IIP. I assume most of the printing time is time to transfer about a megabyte across the parallel interface (but at that, it seems kinda long...) The previewer, I suspect because it deals with much lower resolution fonts and doesn't have to use an i/o port, is considerably faster per page of output.
nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo) (05/10/91)
barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) writes: > How many seconds per page (or pages per second?) does PasTeX 1.2 > run? At school, I'm used to a speed of 1-3 pages per second. What machine is that on? Just curious. Anyway, here's my highly unofficial stats, running the latest version of PasTeX on a 12-page LaTeX file with lots of equations. Timings were gathered by simultaneously watching a clock on the screen and noticing when left brackets popped up; I estimate them to be accurate to within 2 seconds. Everything is running off a Quantum 105M hard disk. 09:17:30 Command typed. :31 TeX banner appears. :46 LaTeX format file finishes loading. :58 [1 appears. 09:18:03 [2 appears. :10 [3 appears. :18 [4 appears. :23 [5 appears. :29 [6 appears. :35 [7 appears. :41 [8 appears. :49 [9 appears. :54 [10 appears. 09:19:02 [11 appears. :08 [12 appears. :12 Done. If we average just the costs of each page (not including the startup cost), we get an average time per page of about 6.2 seconds. If we include the startup cost (i.e. take the total time and divide it by 12), we get 8.5 seconds per page. I find the time per page pretty acceptable for a lowly 7 MHz 68000 machine. The startup cost is pretty high, though--15 seconds to load the format file, plus about 12 seconds to load the document style. Unfortunately, there's no way to make the format file resident (although all the actual programs--virtex, showdvi, initex, etc.--are residentable--kudos to the author). nj
tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns) (05/15/91)
I wrote: > > From memory: running the .tex documents provided with PasTeX and Michael > Doob's "A Gentle Introduction to Tex" (about 100 pages) through virtex > took between 1 and 2 seconds per page. The resulting .dvi file took > _much_ longer to print on my LaserJet IIP. I assume most of the printing > time is time to transfer about a megabyte across the parallel interface > (but at that, it seems kinda long...) The previewer, I suspect because > it deals with much lower resolution fonts and doesn't have to use an i/o > port, is considerably faster per page of output. > ---------- Well, so my memory is a bit foggy. I reran "Gentle", which exercises a lot of the native features of TeX, being a tutorial, but does not use any macro packages. "gentle.tex" was in ram:, and "gentle.dvi" was written to ram:, this on a stock 7 MHz A-1000. It took 14 seconds to spit out the first page, then five additional minutes (within a couple seconds) to process the rest of the document, 96 pages in all. That seems to be about 1/3 page per second, 20 pages per minute. Again, that time is very short compared with the printing time.