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[Rivet] make-plots batch render and -> TikZ?Andy Buckley andy.buckley at cern.chThu Oct 13 20:59:14 BST 2016
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
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