🚀 go-pugleaf

Several people think that TeX under DOS is unfeasible.  I wonder what
percentage of TeX users are doing just that.  Some of my reasons for
preferring TeX under a PC are:

* A much better editing environment.

* I don't ever have to deal with (Ugh!) Sun Microsystems.

* It was relatively easy to install and use.

As for arguments on the other side, yes it is nice to have a
professional to install it and get it running, but it is much harder to
do under unix than under DOS.  Under DOS you don't *need* a
professional, although that would be nice.  As for speed, I have trouble
believing the quoted figure of an hour and a quarter for 400 pages on a
386SX (presumably 16Mh).  My tests suggest that a document with an
ordinary amount of mathematics does about 20 ppm on a 386SX-16 and about
half that on a 286-12.  So 400 pages of ordinary stuff should take about
20 min.  I had a book of 450 pages, that included some dreadful diagrams
(and the machine quite visibly slowed down when it hit them) and it took
an hour and change for 450 pages on a 286-12.  But how often do you run
a 450 page book?  A 20 page paper took enough time to get a cup of
coffee and I can live with that in order to have my favourite editing
environment...  Of course, if you can afford a 486-50, so much the
better.  You can get one around here with a decently large disk and more
graphics than you really need for about Can$2500 and you don't need a
professional to run it.  Add a personal laser printer and you are in
business.  BTW, it is purely subjective, but my output on an HPLJ IIP
is, if anything, slightly superior to that of our office Sun on a Sun
printer.

As for speed, a 486-33 is about the same, perhaps a shade faster, than a
Sun SLC (with one user at the time I tested it).  Thus I expect a 486-50
to be slightly slower than a Sun ELC, which is the same processor, I
believe, as a Sparc 2.

In the book mentioned above, there were some problems with size because
between LaTeX, our macros (over 500), our labels (also over 500) and
some bezier curves on a few pages, we were in danger of exceeding limits
that at the time were built in to the TeX program itself.  Now with
large versions available, for example in emtex, these limits are no
longer a consideration.  In any case, the length of the book itself
is of no consideration since TeX does it one page at a time.  Unless
you run out of space on the disk to store the output.  But then the
same or worse is likely to occur with any word processor and can
also happen under unix^\tm with TeX.

Michael Barr