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Date:         Wed, 12 Aug 1998 20:32:10 -0400
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Subject:      Re: Space and Time (was: Modules)
Status: R

At 03:32 PM 98/08/12 -0700, Marcel Oliver wrote:

>I disagree.  I believe somewhere in the long-term development of TeX
>and/or LaTeX one has to come to a point were visual markup decisions
>(page breaks, float placement, maybe even parshapes) can be done
>within some GUI and are clearly separated from the logical markup
>which is best done in a traditional text editor (thus, getting rid of
>ugly things like float placement parameters, \addtopage, \clearpage
>etc.) in the .tex file.

>This requires a sufficiently fast TeX engine to be useful---the
>avarage PC is now coming into this range.  So I don't think it would
>be a good idea to throw away performance unless it is compensated by a
>clear and major gain in non-performance issues.  This performance may
>be desperately needed in future development of LaTeX which is not yet
>forseen.

I agree.  Working  on the new Technical Addendum (about 100 pages,
300kb TeX source file) for our TeX System, I can reTeX and redisplay
in 2-3 seconds whenever I want to check on how changes affected
the layout. Great when fine-tuning bad line- and  bad page-breaks.
I'd hate to give this up...