Accelerate measurement of dimensions

daqana / tikzDevice

A R package for producing graphics output as PGF/TikZ code for use in TeX documents.

https://daqana.github.io/tikzDevice

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Accelerate measurement of dimensions #5

Open krlmlr opened 11 years ago

krlmlr commented 11 years ago

Currently, each string to be measured requires one run of latex. This is horribly inefficient.

The following scenario could help:

On demand, start latex and grab its stdin and stdout
When a text needs to be measured, write to stdin and listen to what is printed on stdout
When closing the device, finish the process

Module latexStrWidth.R.

krlmlr commented 11 years ago

Here's more detail:

Open a pipe using p = pipe("pdflatex", "w")
Write commands to that pipe using cat("\\measureThis{...}", file=p)
These commands write, on the LaTeX end, to a temporary output file, and flush right after writing
We grab the contents of this output file

This might even work on Windows. Reading from pdflatex' s stdout seems to require fifos.

krlmlr commented 11 years ago

Obviously, Charlie had the same idea: https://github.com/yihui/tikzDevice/commits/feature/texPipe. Can use this, I hope.

krlmlr commented 10 years ago

Perhaps more robust and easier to implement -- use a precompiled preamble first. Preamble depends only on document declaration and packages, these change rarely.

krlmlr commented 10 years ago

Do we really need measuring separately for each cex value? Isn't it just a scaling factor anyway?

krlmlr commented 10 years ago

LaTeX package mylatexformat could be a big help here. Also allow reusing an existing format, in case the user already has set up his format file.