Re: Concerns about print preview implementation

[mortenw gnome org (Morten Welinder)]

> Why would an external app be slower, greedier, whatever than an
> in-memory approach?

MEMORY:

The external application needs to be given the entire document,
or else things like NextPage won't work.

An in-memory approach could get by with having one page at a time
generated.

That is the difference between a couple of mega-bytes and a couple
of hundred mega-bytes.

If you could sort-of script the external viewer you might get the
same effect and gain fault-isolation.  That would be nice.


CPU USAGE:

Depending on interface, for the external approach you will probably
have to render a lot of floating-point numbers to ascii and do the
other way in the viewer.  An in-memory approach would not have to do
that.  Try printing a million random floating-point numbers to a
file and see how long time that takes.