On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 16:31 +0100, Helge Hafting wrote: > Darren Freeman wrote: > > I'm always paranoid that I'm generating a 'bad' PDF or that something > > else might be changing if I don't stick to the same one.. but then which > > one should I use? :) > > > pdflatex is the _fastest_ by far - a good reason for using that one. > You also need pdflatex if you want to use the microtype package for > improving line breaking and hyphenation. > > dvipdfm is slower, and hasn't been maintained for some time. > > ps2pdf is the slowest of all, but it is necessary if you use the > pstricks package for your figures.
I normally use this one because it's bound to the 'P' so I figure it's got to be the preferred one. (Now you tell me it's the slowest!!) But if I'm submitting a paper in which I have to first export to tex and manually generate a proof PDF, I use pdflatex because I'm used to it at the command line.. I'm just following what I know without really understanding in this case :) So how do I know if I'm using pstricks? I don't use it on purpose, but does LyX use it in certain cases? Then I would have been making an error in the above paragraph and not knowing it. > > Perhaps the configure script should attempt to bind them one at a time > > to PDF until one has all the necessary executables installed to succeed > > in exporting a test file. This would be cool for some of the other > > formats too if multiple methods can be found. > > > The three ways aren't equivalent, only almost equivalent. Yay. If this is true then it *must* be documented. It's not fair that I've gone this long without an explanation. What's worse, my intuition failed to give the right answer, and I think the only case where documentation is optional is where intuition succeeds. What about having the three methods named pdf1, pdf2, pdf3, and then the configure script aliases the first successful method as pdf (using some kind of converter alias implementation), which is the only one that appears in the menu? If the user changes pdf to point to another, then when the configure script is run again it keeps the changed alias unless it happens to fail when tested. If pdf doesn't exist at all, then all three appear in the menu. This convention could be followed when building the menu, that xxxn wouldn't appear if xxx exists, where xxx is a word and n is a digit. Have fun, Darren
