From: tlm@nextasy.physics.mcmaster.ca (Tom Marchioro)
Subject: Re: Ramdisk coming for NeXT (and InstantTeX woes)
Organization: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Distribution: fb20
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 20:05:07 GMT

meyergru@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Uwe Meyer-Gruhl) writes:
: 
: In article <1992Aug10.114453.13836@cs.tu-berlin.de>, marcel@opal.cs.tu-berlin.de (Marcel Weiher) writes:
: |> jmd@cube.handheld.com (Jim De Arras) writes:
: |> 
:|>>article <1992Aug9.194718.15868@leland.Stanford.EDU> dmitri@physics (Dmitri  
:|> >Linde) writes:

<< various lines about RAMdisc edited out for brevity >>

: |> Probably just as much of a joke as his InstantTeX package.  
: |> "It'll do all Edit can do, and only costs $150".  Has a cutesy
: |> Icon, though.
: |> 
: |> Marcel
: 
: Right. I thought that InstantTeX would do like other TeX-WYSIWYG-packages
: which TeX in realtime. It simply does not. What it does is starting TeX
: once in a while when you type. This works well with letters and other small
: documents, but have you ever tried some _real work_, like a 50+ page document?
: 

While I don't want to serve as an apologist for InstantTeX  --- it's hardly
a "completed" product since it violates virtually every NeXT convention
for GUI, and it's pretty silly to compare the cost of IT, which is just
a front end for the already bundled TeX, with a complete TeX installation
like Textures ---  I do think there are some things to be said in Linde's
favor.  Specifically, he did solve the question of getting the previewer to
"reopen on current page" so that as you make changes to your file the 
previewer shows them to you, rather than going back to the beginning of
the document.  

Also, the original Lightning TeXtures, as memory serves me, was not 
much better than IT. It bogged down very quickly once the document got
to be 2-3 pages long. It's apparently improved a great deal since I
saw that demo version (which was probably not on a good piece of hardware
either, but I don't remember specifically) and according to the latest
posts on comp.text.tex the new release **really** flies because BSR
re-wrote the whole thing in some sort of fast Mac assembler code.  I'll have
to check it out some time :-)

I ran the IT demo on a couple of different documents and found it worked
reasonably well on fairly mathematical document of 5 pages. What's 
disappointing, in some sense, is how poorly it works on *short* documents. 
My NeXT has only 8 Mb, and if you have WM, Edit, Stuart, TeXview and a
couple other things going the disc churns and churns re-loading TeX every
second or two. Drove me nuts!  Worst of all, you get this behavior
even for two lines of text!

: I would actually believe in Dmitri writing a ramdisk for the NeXT. I have
: waited long for something like that to hog up my memory. There are already
: enough useful programs that use much memory, why not try one that does
: nothing but add no free space?
: 

More likely what will be needed is a complete rewriting of TeX so that it
can sort of "sit there" waiting to be invoked again, as opposed to 
running like a batch job.  Charlie Fletcher tells me there is a project
of this nature going on at Berkeley (called VORTeX I believe) but it
must be a pretty large restructuring of TeX, itself a highly complicated
program.  Maybe if you have enough RAM (and I know I want more, IT or no 
IT) and cna get some improvement from a RAMdisc (or some such thing) IT
will work smoothly in RAM; but far more likely WYSIWYG TeX will take a 
major amount of rewriting Knuth's code.

If having the near-instant feedback to your TeXing is important to you
(and for the life of me I don't know why people find this attractive.
I mean, do you re-compile your code every 30 seconds?) check out loTeX
from the archives.  Much simpler in aim than InstantTeX, but free and
with some other useful features (and written by Derek Beatty, a great
fellow!).

Oh yeah, I agree heartily!!  IT does have a GREAT Icon.

Tom