[postgis-devel] Math expressions in documentation

[Tom Lane]

Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland at siriusit.co.uk> writes:
> Kevin Neufeld wrote:
>> Any suggestions?  Does anyone have experience with MathML?  It's really 
>> rather simple, but my Fedora box takes forever loading the MathML DTD. 
>> Or should we simply just leave them as images?

> If it's any help, I had the same problem with docbook builds taking a 
> long time on my laptop here. I eventually traced the problem to the fact 
> that I was missing a particular docbook stylesheet package, which was 
> causing xsltproc to re-download the original DTD over the internet every 
> time it was referenced :(  Try using tcpdump or a similar tool to see if 
> this is happening to you.

Something else that might be happening: under certain usage patterns,
openjade's internal implementation of lists can exhibit O(N^2) behavior,
which is very unhappy-making when you get to lists of tens of thousands
of elements.  This is why it used to take two or three days to build the
main Postgres documentation in PDF format :-(.  I made a patch for
openjade at about the same time that Peter Eisentraut found a way to
avoid the performance problem by modifying our stylesheets.  (Since then
we've relied on Peter's workaround, which is a good thing because
openjade upstream has yet to issue a fixed version...)

It's possible that MathML tickles the same problem and my patch would
help.  If "top" shows the openjade process eating 100% CPU it'd be worth
a try --- I can send the patch if you need it.

			regards, tom lane