30 Nov
2006
30 Nov
'06
6:23 a.m.
Mark Eli Kalderon wrote:
There is a limit to how fast an accurate utility could be if it is to accommodate the kind of procedural aspects of LaTeX syntax that Haris was referring to.
Indeed: but all that work has already been done, as the command is operating on the pdf file. So the real question becomes: why is ps2ascii (aka ghostscript) so slow? (Just checked on my work machine, a 2GHz intel iMac with 2G of memory, and it's still about 30 seconds on a 250 page, 1.2MB pdf file.)
I guess it's just an irreducibly difficult procedure... Moral of this story? Don't count words very often!
Cheers, Paul