Angus Leeming <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Friday 12 July 2002 9:41 am, David Kastrup wrote: > > Well, PNG image support will mean previews will be much more fun, and > > their loading will not spend an infinite amount of time... > > Incidentally, whilst total loading time will remain high, actual > impact on the user will be negligible once I finish this "smart > loader" stuff. The previews in PPM format will take a fraction of a > second longer to appear than the ideal case of native PNG loading > once they've been generated.
"Once they've been generated". Writing dozens of MBs of data is even slower than reading them. And of course, the buffer cache gets polluted with image data instead of keeping more important stuff. Anyway, GhostScript takes up quite a bit of time, too. So while you are fiddling around with the loader, don't make decisions that would make it awkward to eventually run GhostScript in daemon mode, telling it what image it should be converting next. In preview-latex, by far the slowest stage is GhostScript, and yet it is the one least impacting responsiveness, because it can cater to the requests in the needed order, depending on what is currently on-screen. dvipng offers similar functionality. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
