Joel Pedro wrote:
Thanks for the advice Paul.
I am using MiKTeX. I tried running pdflatex from DOS prompt. This works ok -
much faster than with LyX. I dont get any useful diagnostic. Does this suggest
the problem is with LyX? How do I determine if font generation is hosted on my
machine?
Sorry, that was "hosed" (American slang for "broken") rather than
"hosted". I need to watch my vernacular. :-)
If pdflatex at the DOS prompt ran at what you would consider to be
normal or acceptable speed, and did not produce any diagnostics, then
font generation is not the culprit. A quick test would be to retry the
same document in LyX after successfully generating and view the PDF file
from DOS. Once the necessary fonts are generated, they are stored on
your hard drive, and there is no need to generate them again. So if
font generation were an issue, previewing PDF (or DVI) from LyX would be
fine once you had done it outside LyX. My guess is that is not the problem.
You would seem to have enough RAM (more than I have; I'm jealous), but
it's always possible that enough other junk is being loaded to make you
RAM-tight. When you preview from LyX and it takes a long time, is the
hard drive thrashing (cycling continuously)? That could be an
indication that you are short of RAM and doing a lot of page-swapping.
Another possibility would be that there is a problem with where LyX is
writing temporary files. Tools -> Preferences -> Paths -> Temporary
directory will tell you where LyX is putting the temporary files. Is it
on your main hard drive, or is it perhaps set to use a network drive?
If it's on your machine, does the partition containing that directory
have a reasonable amount of free space? (I think this is a stretch, but
one difference between your running pdflatex at a DOS prompt and LyX
running it is where the files are placed.)
One last thing that comes to mind: Is MiKTeX the only LaTeX
distribution on your machine? In particular, do you have Cygwin
installed? I once had a problem on a machine that had Cygwin: I
installed MiKTeX without realizing that Cygwin came with its own version
of latex, which was ahead of MiKTeX on the command path. If you run
'pdflatex --version' from a DOS prompt, does it identify itself as
MiKTeX-pdfTeX?
/Paul
