From: ecsgrt@latrobe.edu.au (Geoffrey Tobin)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Fast LaTeX preview on PC?
Date: 11 Apr 92 04:22:39 GMT
Organization: La Trobe University

I've just sent an email to Knud Erik Meyer concerning WP vs (La)TeX
vis-a-vis disk space, speed & WYSIWYG on an IBM PC/386, which upon
reflection I thought might be informative to others as well.  So
here it is.

In article <1992Apr10.113700.6129@uts.uni-c.dk>
    fumekem@uts.uni-c.dk (Knud Erik Meyer) writes:

>Thanks for the answers that I have received by mail. Now I have tried
>emTeX and I find it a fairly good solution, even though it takes quite
>some space on the harddisk. But still I am dreaming about a preview as 
>fast (and small?) as e.g. WordPerfect. It does not matter if the fonts
>would not be perfect. 

1.  EmTeX is large because it has almost everything.  But you needn't
    _instal_ everything.  Eg, do you need Web on HD ?  Do you need
    all those fonts & magnifications?  It's a good idea to reduce
    the set of fonts to the ones you often use.  You can delete
    fonts from the Font Libraries.  You can generate PK & TFM files
    on request.  You can leave the MF files off HD until needed for
    font generation.  Not all the executables are often needed.
    (But always keep them backed up.)

    The documents can be processed & printed, then removed from the
    HD.  (They're better read & mor accessible on paper, I think.)
    Some are TeX files, so that's easy.  Others are not ready for
    TeXing, but using a verbatim style, you can use TeX to print
    those documents, but with margins - yay!

2.  Word Perfect's preview is fast because most of the time you only
    use it as a screen editor.  When you ask it to fill paragraphs,
    does it use hyphenation?  Does WP have symbolic forward references?
    WP doesn't handle equations & floating figures & tables as well as
    TeX & its macro package LaTeX.
    
    I had trouble getting WP to align columns in a resum\'e - I'm told
    WP got confused about the fonts & got the character widths wrong
    - which is one problem TeX hasn't given me.  In WP, the screen
    showed the alignments as correct, but the printout was wacky.
    It took me ages to coax WP into forming a document that would print
    nearly aligned.  So WP is _not_ WYSIWYG, after all !  That, the
    limited equation handling in WP 5.1, and the few copies of WP among
    several people, are why I finally gave up WP for TeX.

    Word Perfect _does_ compile some documents - I've seen a colleague
    running it - and then it takes _ages_and_ages_.  So it's slower,
    I think, than TeX when it's doing comparable tasks.

    My colleague has just come in, so I've asked him for some facts
    & figures.  Giving Word Perfect a 40 to 50 page document _without_
    equations, to convert it into a form ready for printing takes
    about 10 to 15 minutes on a '386.  Tables & equations slow WP down
    a _lot_, equations by a factor of at least three.  With equations
    in such a document, WP takes 30 to 40 minutes to convert it.

3.  EmTeX, Tomas Rokicki's dvips, psfig, & other programs, including
    TeXshell (once it's debugged), work together well.  In fact, they
    are designed with each other in mind.

gt
(Geoffrey Tobin)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex