> That's part of the reason LaTeX has such good text wrapping -- it can spend serious CPU cycles on the problem because it doesn't do it in real time.
Is that the reason the Microsoft Word team tells themselves as well?
We have multi-core, multi-gigahertz CPUs these days: there aren't cycles to spare to do this?
You would think, but Word has some serious efficiency problems that I can't explain. For one, it is an order of magnitude slower at simply performing word counts than tools like wc or awk. Besides that, the problem does not parallelize well, due to the long-range dependency of line breaks.
Zooming in a bit, Word also does not kern fonts as well as LaTeX, so it might be missing some logic there that would trickle down into more beautiful word spacing and text flow.
It's a O(n^2) to O(n!) problem, not O(n), so it doesn't scale linearly with cpu cores.
Sorta? For one, you don't always have to do full site optimization for this problem. As such, the "N" you are working over is going to be limited to the number of breaks within a section you are looking at. And you can probably divide work across the sections quite liberally on a page.
Yes, there can be edge cases where optimizing one section causes another section to be resized. My gut is that that is the exception, not the norm. More, for most of the resizes that will lead folks to do, it will largely result in a "card" being moved up/down in such a way that the contents of that card do not need to be re-optimized.
Yes, you could make this even harder by optimizing what the width of a section should be and flowing another section around it. But how many sites actually do something like that?
to be honest as a LaTeX user on a very beefy CPU I regularly have 30s+ of build times for larger documents. I doubt Word users would want that. A simple 3 page letter without any graphics is a couple seconds already.
I'd hazard most of that 30s+ build time is not in the line wrapping algorithm. Most slow documents are either very heavy in math typesetting, or loaded with many cross references needing multiple passes through TeX to reconcile.
To be clear, just because I would hazard that, does not mean I'm right. Would love to see some benchmarks.
Mine are slow because of large images. If I set "draft" mode, it speeds up dramatically. I don't know why latex needs to read the entire image file but it seems to do that.
> to be honest as a LaTeX user on a very beefy CPU I regularly have 30s+ of build times for larger documents.
A lot of the time folks are sitting and thinking and things are idle. Perhaps Word could 'reflow' text in the background (at least the parts that are off screen)? Also, maybe the saved .docx could perhaps have hints so that on loading things don't have be recalculated?
Oh dear lord, the last thing I ever wanted Word to do was to try and reflow things. I can't be the only person that tried to move an image only to have it somehow disappear into the ether while Word tried to flow around it. :D