Re: Lua/Tikz terminal behavior

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 4:12 AM, Philipp K. Janert wrote:
>
> For what it's worth, here are some differences
> between the TikZ and cairolatex:
>
> 1) TikZ creates only ONE file, whereas cairolatex
>   needs two (one for the actual graph, one for the
>   labels).
> 2) The .tex files created by TikZ may be large,
>   because they must contain all the data (or, for
>   function plots, the fct evaluated at all points).
>   (Apparently, these large tex files can cause memory
>   problems for Latex, but I have not pushed it to that
>   point.)

In the beginning when I was developing the "context" terminal (very
similar to TikZ, but TikZ didn't yet exist at that time) I often
tested with "load all.dem" and ran into "memory limit exceeded" very
often, in particular with all those 100x100 or 200x200 image files
drawn as 40.000 separate rectangles, each rectangle taking up three
not so short lines of text.

In LuaTeX most of those memory limits are gone compared to pdfTeX, so
it's easier and faster to process the graphics, but it doesn't change
the fact that some graphs need tens of thousands of not-so-short lines
which takes a lot of time to read the graphic in. In such cases of
lots of graphical elements using something that creates a separate PDF
is way more efficient.

Cairolatex didn't exist when TikZ was created.

Mojca