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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers)
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re:  One man's experience with TeX vs troff: timings
Message-ID: <1767@uw-beaver>
Date: Sun, 23-Sep-84 23:46:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1767
Posted: Sun Sep 23 23:46:26 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Sep-84 05:25:52 EDT
Sender: yenbut@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 39

From: chris@maryland (Chris Torek)
Certainly it's difficult.  One timing doesn't say a whole lot.  The
only way you can tell for sure which one is faster for your own papers
is to try both.  Of course, this is impractical for most people.

However, I don't think the postprocessing time should be discounted,
since that is a (sometimes quite large!) factor in the overall time
consumed.  Again, though, this time will depend on what you are doing.
For example, the Versatec driver must read in a complete page, sort it,
and then reprocess it later to push bits onto the page.  An Imagen
driver can be one pass and would be considerably more simple, since one
just downloads glyphs then invokes them at the proper position.

If you *are* using an Imagen, there is something else to think about:
the Imagen software for troff works by converting the C/A/T typesetter
codes to DVI files (TeX output), which is then reprocessed into imPRESS
(Imagen's typesetting codes).  Since TeX output doesn't use this
intermediate process, the postprocessing time will naturally be less.

(Side note:  catdvi's output is not quite compatible with TeX82's
output, so Imagen's ``dviimp'' program doesn't work for TeX.  Instead,
we're using a temporary patch to Mike Urban's driver to make it work on
8/300s.  *Sigh*)

Then again, if you actually have a C/A/T systems phototypesetter, troff
would probably be faster than TeX. . . .  (Also, there is the fact that
troff is much smaller than TeX -- at least, if you're using the
standard one (ours has *BIG* internal buffers and runs around 700K).
And I doubt that anyone has TeX running on PDP-11's.)

Anyway, to get back to the point, it's not a simple issue and I just
mailed out those timings as an interesting statistic (hence the subject
line).
--
(This page accidently left blank.)

In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci (301) 454-7690
UUCP:	{seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris@umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris@maryland