# $Id: README,v 1.2 2002/02/23 15:19:23 jfine Exp $
# This file is for release 0.3 of texd


THE TEX DAEMON AND TEXPAD
=========================
This bundle has two major parts.  

The first is texd, the TeX daemon.  Applied to small files, texd can
be many times quicker than the regular way of using TeX.

The second is TeXpad and LaTeXpad, which are interactive 'calculators'
for evaluating small pieces of TeX code.

For news and updates, visit the Active TeX website
    http://www.activetex.org


THE TEX DAEMON
==============
TeX is an efficient typesetting program, but it takes a while to get
going.  On my machine, which is a 225MHz Cyrix, it takes a full
quarter second to load, but then it can process a simple page in 5
thousands of a second.  In other words, the ratio is about 50 to 1.

The commands
    $ time tex \\end 
    $ time tex story \\end 
will tell the story for your machine.

The TeX daemon allows us to avoid this start-up overhead.  


DVICHOP
=======
This is a new program, written specifically to enable the TeX daemon.

The dvichop program takes as input a stream of dvi pages.  Its output
is a sequence of usually small dvi files.  Marker pages in the input
stream control the division into output dvi files.


IPCTEX
======

Most implementations of TeX, for reasons of efficiency, buffer their
output dvi stream.  This forces the TeX daemon to write empty pages,
to flush out the current page.  This is inefficient.

To get the best out the the TeX daemon, you will need a version of TeX
that disables this system dependant feature.  For example, in the
web2c version, build with --enable-ipc and call with command line
switch -ipc.


HISTORY OF IPCTEX
=================
Tom Rokicki's implementation of TeX for the NeXT computer contained an
important innovation.  It allowed the previewer to start previewing
the dvi file, before TeX had finished producing it.  To support this,
it allowed output to be written to a socket.  It also suppressed the
output buffering.

Essentially, ipctex is Tom Rokicki's TeX for NeXT.


INSTANT PREVIEW
===============
Previously, Instant Preview was part of the "texd" package.  From
now on, it will be distributed separately.

Instant Preview is being rewritten, to use the interface to the TeX
daemon exposed by the new file "dvichop.sty".


REQUIREMENTS
============

This software has been developed on Linux.  It should run on Unix
platforms, but this has not been tested.

See the separate file INSTALL for installation notes.

# README ends here