Re: man page rendering speed (was: Playground pager lsp(1))

Eli Zaretskii
2023-04-07T15:07:37Z

> Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2023 09:43:19 -0500
> From: "G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
> Cc: alx.manpages@gmail.com, dirk@gouders.net, cjwatson@debian.org,
> linux-man@vger.kernel.org, help-texinfo@gnu.org, groff@gnu.org
>
> ...which brings me to the other factor, of which I'm more confident: man
> page rendering times are much lower than they were in Unix's early days.
>
> On my system, all groff man pages but one render in between a tenth and
> a fortieth of a second. The really huge pages like groff(7),
> groff_char(7), and groff_diff(7) are toward the upper end of this range,
> because they are long, at ~20-25 U.S. letter pages when formatted for
> PostScript or PDF, or have many large tables so the tbl(1) preprocessor
> produces a lot of output.
>
> The outlier is groff_mdoc(7) at just over one-third of a second.

Some people consider 0.1 sec, let alone 0.3 sec, to be long enough to
be annoying.

Also, did you try with libpng.3 or gcc.1?

> Human subjects need a minimum of about 0.1 second of visual experience
> or about .01 to .02 second of auditory experience to perceive
> duration; any shorter experiences are called instantaneous.
> -- Encyclopædia Britannica[2]

IME, 0.05 sec of visual experiences is closer to reality.

Anyway, I won't argue.