Slide Manufacturing

SmallProf does produce some useful results, however
Here's the data sorted by CPU time:

     count wall tm  cpu time line
        83 73.67689 31.70000   287:  system $cmd;
      1960 0.637309 0.340000    69:  if (/^(\t|\s{5})/ && !($DIVERSION{active}
      1896 0.659382 0.280000    94:  if (/^-{12}/ || /^={32}/) {
      1960 0.307705 0.240000    68:  s{%(\w+)%}{exists $macro{$1} ? $macro{$1} :
      1813 0.330660 0.210000   210:  $accumulated .= $_ unless $skip_this;
      1960 0.275886 0.200000    83:  if ($MACROS && s/^\#MACRO\#\s+//) {
      1960 0.337091 0.180000    67:while (<STDIN>) {
      1960 0.250034 0.180000    91:  next if /^\#{3}/;
      1813 0.290792 0.180000   202:  if ($DIVERSION{active} && (/^(\#\*|  )   /
      1897 0.284703 0.170000    92:  last if /^-{50,}END/;
       524 0.464508 0.150000    74:    $length -= 3 while / \[\w\[ | \]\w\]/xg;
       524 0.233224 0.100000    73:    $length -= 2 while / \[  \[ | \]  \]/xg;

Clearly, run time is dominated by line 287

     285    my $cmd = qq{$TXT2HTML $enc 
                         --setvar MJD_FIRST_FILE=$firsthtml 
                         --setvar MJD_LAST_FILE=$lasthtml
                         --setvar MJD_NEXT_FILE=$nexthtml
                         --setvar MJD_PREV_FILE=$prevhtml
                         --setvar MJD_SLIDE_NUMBER=$slideno
                         --title '$title' $slide > $html};
     286  #  print STDERR "Command: $cmd\n";
     287    system $cmd;

There's probably not too much we can do about this