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Do you have benchmarks for running a tex engine on a tablet CPU? Everytime this topic comes upo on comp.tex the consensus seems to be that tablets are not yet c

by dfc 15y ago

Do you have benchmarks for running a tex engine on a tablet CPU? Everytime this topic comes upo on comp.tex the consensus seems to be that tablets are not yet capable of running tex on the fly.

wtallis 15y ago
Are tablet CPUs fast enough? Probably not for a whole book, but for a single chapter? Almost certainly. And if you eschew the features of XeTeX or LuaTeX and just stick with pdfTeX, things could be very quick: For the example I posted elsewhere in this thread of typesetting a novel in 30s with XeLaTeX, pdfTeX does it in about 6s. A single chapter (32k of text): 0.8s, and I/O bound at that. Even if a tablet's 800Mhz Cortex A8 does that 5 times slower than my Core 2, it's fast enough to be done speculatively. It's certainly no slower than loading a web page over the internet.
- dfc 15y ago
  Is the single chapter time with all of the modern typographic features the main article is about or without them (pdftex)?
  - wtallis 15y ago
    For the single chapter test, the book was stored with each chapter in a separate tex file. All but one of the \input statements was commented out, but the preamble stayed the same as in the previous test: pdfLaTeX with microtype, memoir class, but no fontspec. The output was 25 pages. Enabling SyncTeX gives about a 30% slowdown in wall time, but only about 10% slowdown in CPU time. (For comparison, when run on the slowest CPU I have handy, a 1.5Ghz Athlon XP, the single chapter takes 1.5s wall time and 1.1s CPU time.)
- kellishaver 15y ago
  What effect would the extra required processing over the course of an entire book have on battery life of the device?
pdw 15y ago
The core of TeX is fast enough for any modern hardware, even tablets. For example, my laptop can compile the 494 page TeXbook (http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbook http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbook) in about half a second. What slows TeX down is that many packages use extremely elaborate abstractions, which all need to be evaluated using string expansion. These days you shouldn't be surprised if some package is using floating point emulation with TeX macros (https://github.com/latex3/svn-mirror/blob/master/l3kernel/l3fp.dtx https://github.com/latex3/svn-mirror/blob/master/l3kernel/l3...) behind your back. Handy yes, but certainly not fast.

by dfc 15y ago

Do you have benchmarks for running a tex engine on a tablet CPU? Everytime this topic comes upo on comp.tex the consensus seems to be that tablets are not yet capable of running tex on the fly.

wtallis 15y ago

Are tablet CPUs fast enough? Probably not for a whole book, but for a single chapter? Almost certainly. And if you eschew the features of XeTeX or LuaTeX and just stick with pdfTeX, things could be very quick: For the example I posted elsewhere in this thread of typesetting a novel in 30s with XeLaTeX, pdfTeX does it in about 6s. A single chapter (32k of text): 0.8s, and I/O bound at that. Even if a tablet's 800Mhz Cortex A8 does that 5 times slower than my Core 2, it's fast enough to be done speculatively. It's certainly no slower than loading a web page over the internet.

dfc 15y ago
Is the single chapter time with all of the modern typographic features the main article is about or without them (pdftex)?
- wtallis 15y ago
  For the single chapter test, the book was stored with each chapter in a separate tex file. All but one of the \input statements was commented out, but the preamble stayed the same as in the previous test: pdfLaTeX with microtype, memoir class, but no fontspec. The output was 25 pages. Enabling SyncTeX gives about a 30% slowdown in wall time, but only about 10% slowdown in CPU time. (For comparison, when run on the slowest CPU I have handy, a 1.5Ghz Athlon XP, the single chapter takes 1.5s wall time and 1.1s CPU time.)
kellishaver 15y ago
What effect would the extra required processing over the course of an entire book have on battery life of the device?

pdw 15y ago

The core of TeX is fast enough for any modern hardware, even tablets. For example, my laptop can compile the 494 page TeXbook (http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbook http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbook) in about half a second. What slows TeX down is that many packages use extremely elaborate abstractions, which all need to be evaluated using string expansion. These days you shouldn't be surprised if some package is using floating point emulation with TeX macros (https://github.com/latex3/svn-mirror/blob/master/l3kernel/l3fp.dtx https://github.com/latex3/svn-mirror/blob/master/l3kernel/l3...) behind your back. Handy yes, but certainly not fast.