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

[Frank Siegert]

Hi Andy,

On 13 October 2016 at 21:59, Andy Buckley <andy.buckley at cern.ch> wrote:
> 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!

Thanks, sounds interesting. Does that mean with the one-big-doc
approach make-plots would only use a single core and still be 1/3
quicker than in the old approach when using 4 cores? Sounds
surprisingly good, though practically (>4 cores available on many
machines) it wouldn't be a path I would pursue.

> 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?

Absolutely in favour, unless it makes it significantly slower!
By the way, maybe that was discussed at the dev workshop, but was the
idea of eventually rewriting make-plots in matplotlib scratched? I
know that we haven't gotten past some technical feasibility studies
yet (at least I, maybe you have got further?), but I don't remember
any final decision against it.

Cheers,
Frank