As I've added more and more images to my Scribble output I've noticed empirically a considerable slowdown.
Currently it takes around 56 seconds to process my main file (which includes around 36 figures); 8 seconds when I commented out all the images. In hunting for the main bottleneck I came across this post -- http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/39929/fast-png-embedding-using-pdflatex-- which says "PNG are recompressed during the pdfTeX run in general, but in some cases, a direct copy is possible, which is much faster". Conditions are given under which pngs recompression should not be induced, but a straightforward albeit indirect alternative method is also suggested -- use "convert" (part of ImgeMagick) to pre-process the pngs into pdfs. A quick test of the latter with a single image gave me a speedup using Scribble from around 3.2s with straight inclusion of a png to 2.8s including a pre-processed pdf of the same image (pre-processing with convert is very fast, btw), suggesting that this may well be a significant source of slow-down. Now, based on this I expect that I'll be able to get a reasonable speed-up by saving out pngs, convert-ing them, and @image{}-ing the files back into my Scribble, but I was wondering whether someone might have other tips and/or whether there's any prospect of snappier image inclusion in the standard pipeline: e.g. by ensuring that pngs are output in a format that isn't recompressed or incorporating the convert trick into the conventional Scribble to pdf pipeline. Thanks Dan
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