[tex-live] TeX Live 2014

[Philip Taylor]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> Sigh, Microsoft Security Essentials worked for you but another user
> told us that he had to turn it off while installing TeX Live.

Is it possible that he was performing a non-administrator installation ?

> BTW, IMO programs which scan the whole disk are useless because when
> they detect a virus, it's actualy too late.  It's more reliable to
> patch system calls like write() and obey everything written to the
> disk.  These scanners can react immediately and are more reliable.

I don't pretend to know into which of these categories any of my 
anti-malware/anti-virus programs fall, but I can say with confidence 
that I regularly get reports from both Nod-32 and from Malwarebytes 
Premium that they have prevented some illicit activity (I particularly 
like the fact that they prevent access to seemingly legitimate web 
sites, but they also catch nasties in downloads, etc).

Advance notice of a question to be posted tomorrow :

On my main machine, I run TeX Live in a VM with 3340Gb of memory. My 
main project at the moment relies on PDF image inclusion by XeTeX. 
Changing the "V" parameter from "5" to "6" in my local copy of 
"dvipdfmx.cfg" not only suppresses a large number of messages about 
"Version of PDF file is greater than ..." (one for each image file) but 
also speeds up compilation by a factor of about 10.

On this new machine, I have no VMs but I still have 4Gb of memory.  TeX 
Live 2014 does not whinge about "Version of PDF file is greater than 
..." with "V 5" in the default "dvipdfmx.cfg" (good) but increasing "V 
5" to "V 6" or even "V 7" makes no difference whatsoever to the 
compilation speed, which becomes depressingly slow as soon as the first 
image inclusion is encountered.

I will try to document this better tomorrow, but in the mean time can 
anyone think of any reason why TeX Live 2013 XeTeX should be able to 
process my document ten times faster than TeX Live 2014 so long as I 
increase "V 5" to "V 6" in a local copy of "dvipdfmx.cfg" whilst the 
latter makes no difference whatsoever in TeX Live 2014 ?

** Phil.