[texhax] Throughput

[William Adams]

On Mar 3, 2011, at 11:03 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> How about saving each such graphic in a \box, and then just using \copy to place it wherever needed? I'd expect that to give a pretty big win, if the same graphics are used many times.

Excellent point.

The last time I was looking at this, xetex had to query the file to get measurement information, even when re-using, which has a lot of overhead, esp. if the file is on a server.

I wondered actually, if it would be possible to replace a graphic during the run and have the new graphic used....

Interestingly, the elapsed time seems about right given my report of a similar project on the xetex mailing list:

On Nov 14, 2007, at 2:18 AM, I wrote:

> ... the  
> typesetting end went perfectly. Best of all, since XeTeX includes a  
> graphic only once, referring to it w/ subsequent uses, the file sizes  
> were quite manageable (We guesstimated a couple of terabytes otherwise).
> 
> 1,581 records. It did take about an hour and a half to typeset the  
> cards proper on my 2.5GHz G5 though (3,162 pages, each of which had a  
> multi-megabyte graphic and every other one had a bitmap signature  
> graphic).


William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.