A lot of the time overheads with LaTeX are in the initial starting up. If you look into, for example, the preview environment, you can look at processing multip

A lot of the time overheads with LaTeX are in the initial starting up. If you look into, for example, the preview environment, you can look at processing multiple snippets of LaTeX much quicker. Of course, such batching doesn't help achieve the goal of real-time LaTeX. If you're willing to eschew the luxuries that PDFTeX provides (microtype and pdf output) and drop back to DVI, it is possible to interpret the DVI yourself in real time using the IPC hack (which allows dumping of dvi on each page flush). The file format is specified in the dvitype manual[1]. Unfortunately, once you've processed the DVI output, you'll discover that many modern TeX fonts do not render, because they are virtual fonts and you will need to implement these. You'll also have to process the TeX font metric files. Once you've done all this, you can easily get TeX to produce in excess of 1000 snippets per second. The rest is up to your rendering backend, but you'd have to be doing a lot wrong to end up with less than 100 per second. [1] http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/texware/dvitype.pdf‎ http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/texware/dvity...