A couple of questions, if anyone can help:

1) I have added arrows to the QuickFix list, using \ra for a right
arrow, &c. \ra will turn into U+2192 in Times New Roman, but I can’t
persuade anything to turn into a ‘heavy rightwards arrow’ U+2799 in
Zapf Dingbats. Anybody know how to do this?

2) I finally got a free-software package to work as advertized: Sage,
a 1.66 GB (3-hour) download. It is a Mathematica/Maple/Magma/Matlab
replacement, happily computes pi to 5000 places (so far), its
light-shaded 3D objects rotate as fast as the mouse moves (and much
faster than I can draw similar polygonal skeletons in my rainbow
calculations), so it has been highly optimized. I mention this
because, working with 200-page files, I find Nisus painfully slow on
saves (as is Spotlight’s or Google Desktop’s subsequent indexing). 3D
rotation involves mouse-tracking, rotation-translation-scaling matrix
specification, matrix multiplication of the object’s homogeneous
matrix (an [x y z 1] row for every point}, and converting the 3D
results to pixel coordinates in the graphics memory. The last step
probably has dedicated hardware these days, but rotation still seems
more complex than saving an RTF file!

I guess the question is whether Nisus is slow because formatting and
unformatting RTF are intrinsically CPU intensive, or slow because
Nisus wraps the job and passes it to Foo who wraps it and passes it to
Bar ... until it works its way down to active code.
	
-- Ferren
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(Dr) Ferren MacIntyre   1 Chemin des Echarts
Campagne sur Aude     11260 France
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OSX 10.5.8  MacBook Pro 5,1
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB