4 ms·

Anyone have any experience? I see a date of a year ago on the page. The latest TeX Users Group meeting, a month or two ago in San Francisco, featured a number

Anyone have any experience? I see a date of a year ago on the page. The latest TeX Users Group meeting, a month or two ago in San Francisco, featured a number of amazing demos of TeX and LaTeX systems compiling large documents basically instantly. Amazing what modern CPU's can do. The TUGboat with the papers should be out soon.

dochtman 7y ago
That seems to refer to the last release, but the GitHub commit history seems active, if not quite high velocity: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/graphs/comm...
mrobot 7y ago
I didn't know what TUGboat was https://tug.org/tugboat/ https://tug.org/tugboat/
dhosek 7y ago
It doesn't really even take 21st century hardware. I remember running TeX on a Silicon Graphics workstation back in the early 90s. The processing was so fast, I didn't realize it had happened. If you consider the hardware restrictions that TeX and MF were written under in the late 70s/early 80s, it makes the system that much more impressive. The WEB source code of these is an education in itself.
boromi 7y ago
Do you have any videos on this? RIght now it takes forever to compile my pdflatex documents.
- taeric 7y ago
  How big of a document are you taking about? And how long is forever?
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  Sorry, I don't believe there are videos this year. I'm looking forward to the articles, though. Even Knuth was visibly struck by the whole thing. And I'd also be interested to hear how big a doc. I have a 300+ page book I am developing, with many graphics. Compilation on my several-years old standard laptop is 5-10 seconds. So I wonder what is up.
wenc 7y ago
> compiling large documents basically instantly Would be interested to see this. TeXLive has always been able to compile documents instantly even a decade ago, but only documents that were a few pages long. When you got into dissertation-sized folders of documents with lots of TikZ images, it takes a little longer but still not that long. (my 160 page dissertation compiled in 10-15s back in the early 2010s on a Core 2 Duo with a non-SSD drive) It was hard to get much faster than that for large documents because LaTeX has (had?) critical paths that defy parallelization. If it is indeed possible to achieve instantaneous compilation for large documents, that would make live-compilation a reality (live compilation already is a reality but for small documents).
- jimhefferon 7y ago
  One demo compiled the TeXbook, again basically instantly.
  - zzleeper 7y ago
    Do you remember which one? Can't seem to find it here: https://tug.org/tug2019/program.html https://tug.org/tug2019/program.html
    - DoctorOetker 7y ago
      I would also really like to know more about this. Could it possibly be the following entry? Saturday, August 10 10:00am David Fuchs What six orders of magnitude of space-time buys you >TeX and MF were designed to run acceptably fast on computers with less than 1/1000th the memory and 1/1000th the processing power of modern devices. Many of the design trade-offs that were made are no longer required or even appropriate.
      - drfuchs 7y ago
        Yes, indeed. An absolute plain vanilla TeX, exactly as Knuth wrote it, and my tool chain compiles it, composes all 495 pages of The TeXbook in 0.300 seconds on a 2012 MacBook Pro laptop (the first "Retina" model). Single threaded, composing pages in 0.6 msec each, running in well under 1 Megabyte total for code and data. Back on the SAIL mainframe (a Dec PDP10) that Knuth used to develop TeX, it was almost exactly 1000 times slower: the pages would tick by every half-second or so (at night, anyway). Of course, nowadays we also have lots more memory to throw around. One cool idea is to modify TeX to retain all the internal data structures for the pages it has created, and run a nice screen viewer directly from that; Doug McKenna gave a slick presentation at the recent Palo Alto / Stanford TUG meeting of such a system that he created in order to enable live viewing of his Hilbert Curves textbook, including displaying figures of space-filling fractal curves that can be arbitrarily zoomed, which is simply impossible to do via PDF. Going further, you can additionally modify TeX so it takes snapshots of its internal state after every page, and is able to pop back to any of these states. Presto, now if the user makes an edit on page 223, TeX can quickly back up to the state of the world just before page 223, and continue on forward with the modified input. Page 223 gets recomposed and immediately redisplayed, essentially in real-time. Of course, the trick here is creating and storing the snapshots efficiently; the TUG demo I gave using The TeXbook runs in a few hundred megabytes, and does the whole "pop back, recompose a page, redisplay it" rigamarole in milliseconds. The bad news is that my stuff is still in the proof-of-concept stage, as there's no support for the well-established extensions to Knuth's TeX (importing graphics, using system fonts, etc.) that are required by the vast majority of LaTeX users. I don't expect any of these features to slow things down appreciably, but time will tell. I intend to do a "Show HN" by and by, with lots more details, when it's able to handle real-world documents. My apologies for failing to successfully fly under the radar until things were ready for prime time. My premature TUG demo was intended to wow Prof. Knuth sufficiently that he'd approve of a decades-late Ph.D. for me. (Happily, he did agree, contingent on just one additional feature being added...)

dochtman 7y ago

That seems to refer to the last release, but the GitHub commit history seems active, if not quite high velocity: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/graphs/comm...

mrobot 7y ago

I didn't know what TUGboat was https://tug.org/tugboat/ https://tug.org/tugboat/

dhosek 7y ago

It doesn't really even take 21st century hardware. I remember running TeX on a Silicon Graphics workstation back in the early 90s. The processing was so fast, I didn't realize it had happened. If you consider the hardware restrictions that TeX and MF were written under in the late 70s/early 80s, it makes the system that much more impressive. The WEB source code of these is an education in itself.

boromi 7y ago

Do you have any videos on this? RIght now it takes forever to compile my pdflatex documents.

taeric 7y ago
How big of a document are you taking about? And how long is forever?
jimhefferon 7y ago
Sorry, I don't believe there are videos this year. I'm looking forward to the articles, though. Even Knuth was visibly struck by the whole thing. And I'd also be interested to hear how big a doc. I have a 300+ page book I am developing, with many graphics. Compilation on my several-years old standard laptop is 5-10 seconds. So I wonder what is up.

wenc 7y ago

> compiling large documents basically instantly Would be interested to see this. TeXLive has always been able to compile documents instantly even a decade ago, but only documents that were a few pages long. When you got into dissertation-sized folders of documents with lots of TikZ images, it takes a little longer but still not that long. (my 160 page dissertation compiled in 10-15s back in the early 2010s on a Core 2 Duo with a non-SSD drive) It was hard to get much faster than that for large documents because LaTeX has (had?) critical paths that defy parallelization. If it is indeed possible to achieve instantaneous compilation for large documents, that would make live-compilation a reality (live compilation already is a reality but for small documents).

jimhefferon 7y ago
One demo compiled the TeXbook, again basically instantly.
- zzleeper 7y ago
  Do you remember which one? Can't seem to find it here: https://tug.org/tug2019/program.html https://tug.org/tug2019/program.html
  - DoctorOetker 7y ago
    I would also really like to know more about this. Could it possibly be the following entry? Saturday, August 10 10:00am David Fuchs What six orders of magnitude of space-time buys you >TeX and MF were designed to run acceptably fast on computers with less than 1/1000th the memory and 1/1000th the processing power of modern devices. Many of the design trade-offs that were made are no longer required or even appropriate.
    - drfuchs 7y ago
      Yes, indeed. An absolute plain vanilla TeX, exactly as Knuth wrote it, and my tool chain compiles it, composes all 495 pages of The TeXbook in 0.300 seconds on a 2012 MacBook Pro laptop (the first "Retina" model). Single threaded, composing pages in 0.6 msec each, running in well under 1 Megabyte total for code and data. Back on the SAIL mainframe (a Dec PDP10) that Knuth used to develop TeX, it was almost exactly 1000 times slower: the pages would tick by every half-second or so (at night, anyway). Of course, nowadays we also have lots more memory to throw around. One cool idea is to modify TeX to retain all the internal data structures for the pages it has created, and run a nice screen viewer directly from that; Doug McKenna gave a slick presentation at the recent Palo Alto / Stanford TUG meeting of such a system that he created in order to enable live viewing of his Hilbert Curves textbook, including displaying figures of space-filling fractal curves that can be arbitrarily zoomed, which is simply impossible to do via PDF. Going further, you can additionally modify TeX so it takes snapshots of its internal state after every page, and is able to pop back to any of these states. Presto, now if the user makes an edit on page 223, TeX can quickly back up to the state of the world just before page 223, and continue on forward with the modified input. Page 223 gets recomposed and immediately redisplayed, essentially in real-time. Of course, the trick here is creating and storing the snapshots efficiently; the TUG demo I gave using The TeXbook runs in a few hundred megabytes, and does the whole "pop back, recompose a page, redisplay it" rigamarole in milliseconds. The bad news is that my stuff is still in the proof-of-concept stage, as there's no support for the well-established extensions to Knuth's TeX (importing graphics, using system fonts, etc.) that are required by the vast majority of LaTeX users. I don't expect any of these features to slow things down appreciably, but time will tell. I intend to do a "Show HN" by and by, with lots more details, when it's able to handle real-world documents. My apologies for failing to successfully fly under the radar until things were ready for prime time. My premature TUG demo was intended to wow Prof. Knuth sufficiently that he'd approve of a decades-late Ph.D. for me. (Happily, he did agree, contingent on just one additional feature being added...)