John Levon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 09:01:38AM +0200, Andre Poenitz wrote: > > > What would be the format that (a) can be produced by gs, (b) > > displayed "natively" by LyX and (c) is the "fastest"? > > Undoubtedly the fastest method is to use the X rendering we used to > for figinset, since there is no intermediate file, and probably no > need to spawn another gs process.
I don't concur here. The usual GHOSTVIEW API of GhostScript is rather broken: it will only render into a single window, and it makes it impossible to have more than a single GhostScript process active. The main problem is of course that there is no reasonable way of rendering images off-screen in advance. With preview-latex, all images from a document are getting rendered in background after the ones on the screen have been dealt with. That means that they will be immediately available when paging around the source later. This can be offered by PNG images, but not by images kept in PostScript format. Also, incremental changes in a buffer imply that the images present in a buffer typically come from different LaTeX runs, consequently from different Dvips runs, and the only way to treat them the same way by a single GhostScript process is to make them self-contained EPS files. But this makes the rendering process much slower than when you are able to load the common PostScript preamble just once for those images that can be generated in a single LaTeX/DviPS run. preview-latex started out with just the approach you describe. But for the given reasons, reverting back to it will not be desirable even in case the utterly broken EPS image implementation of Emacs gets fixed one day. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
