Hi all,
Paul Isambert wrote:
Reinhard Kotucha <[email protected]> a écrit:
On 2013-03-29 at 23:35:54 +0100, Paul Isambert wrote:
> Dumping formats in order to save time is probably a very good
> solution, even though not very widespread as far as I can tell (I
> myself don't use it, but I'm constantly modifying the files I use...).
I could do it because users can't change things anyway. In medical
environments they aren't even allowed to install software themselves
and the IT departments will not change anything because they don't
want to be responsible if somethings goes wrong.
In general it's quite problematic to provide dedicated format files.
Suppose you've written a LaTeX .cls file for your students in order to
write their theses. Providing a dedicated format file would speed up
things significantly, especially if packages like tikz or pgfplots are
used, which load zillions of files.
But format files are not portable among different versions of a
particular program, a format file created under TeX Live 2012 will not
work under TeX Live 2013. The only reasonable way to distribute such
a .cls file is to provide a .zip file which can be extracted either in
TEXMFLOCAL or in TEXMFHOME.
Font preloading makes sense for particular documents. But the
portability issue of format files remains.
That decided me: I've dumped my usual files into a format; I'd never
really done it because, besides changing my files a lot, I didn't
really know how to create a format in TeXLive (a simple shell script
is a safeguard against my forgetting again), and I knew Lua code
wasn't dumped so I had to tweak all Lua material so that it is both
loaded and stored into \everyjob.
The gain in time is quite wonderful. I'm even thinking about writing a
format for every document, with the relevant fonts preloaded; again a
simple script could automate that easily.
That's actually an “old” dream of mine: I'd like to be able to
automatically produce a format for any given document (up to
\begin{document}) which is changed if and only if the preamble is
changed. LuaTeX seems to be the simplest way to do this via some Lua
action. However, so far I wasn't even able to produce a format dump on
LuaTeX. (I'm trying to do this by now using the myformat.ltx and
mylatexformat.ltx, but they produce errors when used with LuaTeX. I
still have a lot to learn for producing formats, I guess …)
> > There is not much text in the PDF files, just a few small tables.
> > Maybe this is the reason why the font subsetting doesn't take much
> > time. The main content of the file are ECG plots created with
> > \pdfliteral. BTW, my first attempt was to use Metapost but it was
> > much too slow. Processing data with Lua and writing PDF stuff
> > directly into the PDF file is extremely fast. It's similar to what
> > you described in a TUGboat article. The difference is that your
> > approach is more Metapost orientated while mine is more PostScript
> > orientated, just because I don't need a user interface.
>
> Nice to know that article rang some bells.
I'm absolutely convinced that many readers enjoyed this article. Of
course, I was interested even more because I was doing something
similar already.
I was very interested, too, and used the functions provided some times.
cheers
Arno
