[Rivet] make-plots batch render and -> TikZ?

[Andy Buckley]

Having been too busy to do real work recently, yesterday I tried 
following David's clever trick with batch compilation and tried to do a 
similar thing in make-plots: rather than multi-processing a different 
LaTeX doc per plot, I made and compiled one big TeX document.

It works, after a bit of fiddling due to pstricks not playing well with 
the standalone class, and does speed things up a bit: 70 plots rendered 
in 45 seconds over 4 cores on my laptop with the current make-plots, 
while it took just over 30 seconds with the one-big-doc approach. And of 
course a hybrid could be tried: split into Ncore biggish docs.

It's not quite the speed gain I was hoping for: graphics are still 
expensive, so no factor x10 gains. But worth pursuing? I have to admit 
that I also found it disconcerting to not have the "N plots remaining" 
feedback to the terminal!

I'm not sure what the effect on speed would be, but this experiment also 
got me wondering about whether a future version should switch internally 
from pstricks to TikZ for rendering. That's definitely where the action 
is in TeX graphics these days, and being able to simplify the processing 
chain from TeX -> DVI -> PS -> PDF to just TeX -> PDF would make things 
a lot easier and less fragile. (I would like to not both with PS and EPS 
anymore... does anyone have a good reason to not use pdflatex?) We could 
maybe stop having to bundle advanced pstricks packages with Rivet, too. 
It would impact users of the SPECIAL plot sections, though, although 
maybe TikZ wrappers for \rput etc. could be provided. There are simple 
TikZ equivalents, of course. Any opinions?

Enough about cosmetics -- back to physics!
Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley, Lecturer / Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Glasgow