Darren Freeman wrote:
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 :)
You can time these using a stopwatch and exporting
something big like the user guide if you like.
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.
LyX have no support for pstricks, so you know it if you ever use it.
If you try pstricks with pdflatex then you get an error instead of
a pdf, so you know immediately that it didn't work at all.
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.
Indeed. I guess the three ways were created in a time
where people knew them all and had their own favourites.
Still, you find this information in tools->preferences->file formats,
and tools->preferences->converters
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.
There is no "pdf1"
pdf = ps2pdf
pdf2 = pdflatex
pdf3 = dvipdfm
We can't provide just one, because they aren't equivalent.
Some people need pdflatex at least, and some need ps2pdf.
Well, LyX itself depends on neither, so we could get rid of
two, but people using various latex packages would be very angry then.
A single user may very well have some documents using pstricks and
some other documents using microtype. (They'll be using the
latex preamble and ERT code to achieve this.)
If you use neither, then you can probably delete the "pdf" and "pdf3"
file formats in order to have a simpler menu. I recommend pdf2/pdflatex
for its speed. Why wait . . .
Helge Hafting
