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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: About TeX as printing engine [Re: Fwd: Re: Application Ideas]
From:       Cristian Tibirna <tibirna () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-08-23 12:57:07
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On Thursday 23 August 2001 07:12, David Faure wrote:
>
> But is displaying DVI fast ? How would one do that ?

No, it's not fast. All font kerning, complex rendering calculations etc. are 
done before (and in order to) build the DVI representation. Anyways, there is 
another round (of less complex) calculations at the conversion from DVI to PS 
or PNG or whatever. Especially page layout (like in margin and spacing 
calculations, font matching etc.)

> Doesn't it boil down to parsing a file - just like with PS ?
> I guess we don't want that, but rather a way to calculate the DVI result in
> memory... Hmm.

Yes, this would be one possibility. But, as I said, this wouldn't solve the 
WYSIWYG problem, as DVI displayed can have differences from PS printed. Like, 
if a TeX font shown in the DVI isn't available as Type1 printer-downloadable 
font, it is replaced with a loose match.

> Lyx/KLyx doesn't display DVI, but some unprecise representation of the text
> and layout, that will be converted to LaTeX, right ?

Yes.

> I guess we'll have to borrow ideas/implementations from TeX etc., but I
> don't see how we can "switch" to it.

IMHO "switching" to TeX isn't a realistic option in any other conditions than 
having an extremely fast DVI builder/PS renderer (on display and 
interactively). Remark that today's machines compute a fairly large TeX file 
into its DVI representation in ridiculously short times (3-4 seconds for a 
200 pages document on P3-533MHz) but still, IMHO it won't be soon possible to 
refresh the DVI representation of a TeX file at each character typing event.

Borrowing ideas from TeX is cool but has the disadvantage of sorta 
reinventing the wheel on a smaller scale. It would be about always catching 
up with the evolving TeX engine (does it still evolve?).
CT

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