Re: [Groff] groff performance in respect to hardware platform

[Clarke Echols]

On 03/23/2016 09:48 PM, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2016, Steve Izma wrote:
> >
> You DO know what you are talking about.
>
> > When I typeset large books, there are some stages, like adjusting
> > track kerning on a page, where I want to see immediate results on my
> > viewer.
>
> Viewing is something entirely different.
>
> Your 'groff' produces Postscript and you can either view the Postscript
> in whatever suits, or convert it to PDF and just use a PDF viewer.
>
> > My current hardware uses a five-year-old four-core CPU. A section of
> > text maybe 50 pages long will update in my viewer in less than two
> > seconds. But trying to do this for a 250-page book is tedious.
>
> It is the rendering of the output that takes the time, not the 'groff'
> processing. Actually you might also have to think about your graphics
> display speed. You probably need to be asking questions of the
> maintainers of the viewer that you are using, not 'groff'.
>
> > That's why I'm interested in processing speed.

I use vim for all of my editing, and have a function key set up so all I
have to do is press it and it executes groff with the options I need to
get the PostScript output in a default file.

I then monitor the file with an open gv(1) window that updates every
time I press the function key and the file is rewritten.  I then use
ps2pdf to get a PDF file when I'm done.  It's fast, easy, and has
never given me any problem about speed.

YMMV.

Clarke