Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!rice!titan!phil From: phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Lattice C bug: unsigned short array subscript sign extended; TeX Message-ID: <1812@kalliope.rice.edu> Date: 23 Aug 88 20:49:58 GMT References: <2993@haven.umd.edu> <1807@kalliope.rice.edu> <25755@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: usenet@rice.edu Reply-To: phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Organization: Rice University, Houston Lines: 59 In article <25755@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> carlson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Richard L. Carlson) writes: >[moved out of the .tech group; hope that doesn't mess people up too much] > >In article <1807@kalliope.rice.edu> phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) writes: >>earlier this year is even "wonderfuller" still. In some ways, my AmigaTeX >>environment is superior to the TeX environment on the Suns (the only two >>non-trivial minuses for the Amiga being the small/interlaced screen and >>the lack of speed). And when you compare AmigaTeX to commercially > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >>available TeX systems for other ... > >I just have to make a clarification about this -- AmigaTeX is not slow! Oh my! I didn't mean to imply that. I was comparing the two overall environments. The difference in speed is, I am sure, solely caused by the difference in processors. I assumed that the context of that parenthetical comment (the fact that it was placed immediately after another hardware deficiency that is not at all the fault of AmigaTeX itself) would make my meaning clear. I firmly place the blame on the 68000/68020 difference! >You're absolutely right that a 68000-Amiga isn't as fast as a 68020-Sun; but >adjusting for raw CPU speed, I would bet that AmigaTeX would win. You are probably right. Furthermore, thanks to the previewer overlapping the previewing with TeX processing (there is a mode where the previewer reads in a page as soon as it is ready---it doesn't wait for TeX to finish), the slowness of the 68000 isn't really noticed because I'm too busy perusing the document! >But, of course, the speed of AmigaTeX depends greatly on how you have your >Amiga environment set up. A couple of comments (that might be obvious to >some, but hopefully will help others) -- if you have enough memory, REZ >AmigaTeX, and it will start up instantly; The tex executable has an option that makes it start over when it finishes a job, thus keeping the executable resident. It has another option that puts it in loop mode *AND* keeps the ".fmt" file in memory, making TeX ready for the next job in less than a second! >similarly, put the format files >in RAM: if you can; and I usually keep my TeX source file (and therefore >TeX's output files) in VD0:. Absolutely! I do that too. Of course, 3 megabytes really helps! The more recent version of AmigaTeX keeps the font files on color-coded disks. If the previewer needs to get a font off of one of the font disks, it will ask for it by color: the requestor asks "please insert disk Black.Red". This system makes it VERY easy to cope with the unavoidable (without a hard disk) multi-floppies problem. As Tom Rokicki and others know, I've raved about AmigaTeX in the past. But I have to say it again: great job, Tom! William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University