[XeTeX] fontspec v1.7

[Will Robertson]

On 19 Jun 2005, at 11:56 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> Le 19 juin 05 à 15:16, Herbert Schulz a écrit :
>> On Jun 19, 2005, at 1:06 AM, Bob Kerstetter wrote:
>>> On Jun 18, 2005, at 4:13 AM, Will Robertson wrote:
>>>> The documentation loads VERY slowly in Tiger's Preview.app for  
>>>> some reason, so it's on my list to create a stripped down  
>>>> version without all the different examples in different fonts.
>>>
>>> Thanks for your work on this. At least here, your documentation  
>>> is not slow at all in Preview. Running a 800 MHz iBook and Tiger  
>>> 10.4.1.
>>
>> I forgot to mention that the documentation .pdf came up fast in  
>> Preview at this end. Files I generate here with XeLaTeX take a  
>> long time to come up in TeXShop and Preview (use the same  
>> underlying engine).
>
> The fontspec documentation comes up fast here in both TeXShop and  
> Preview. But since migrating to Tiger that's generally not the  
> case: after typesetting, the preview window takes a long time to  
> display in TeXShop, and that's even longer for XeLaTeX compared  
> with pdfTeX. All this on a 1 GHz PowerBook G4 running Tiger.
>
> Could this be connected with font caches, such that each time a  
> font is viewed at a new size and in a new variant (bold, italic,  
> etc.) a font cache has to be updated first by OS X before the  
> corresponding page can be displayed? This might explain why for  
> some people fontspec.pdf takes some time to display, while for  
> other people it doesn't.

Hmmm,

Okay, now it seems to load fine in Preview.
When it exhibited slowness, a quick look in top revealed that Preview  
was taking up a large amount of CPU, with ATSServer (? or something  
similar relating to ATS) taking up a fair chunk also, leading me to  
believe that Tiger's font renderer may be somewhat slower as it was  
in 10.3.

Perhaps you're right that since then Mac OS X has cached all the  
fonts and for the next little while it'll load nice and quick. I'm  
fairly tight on HD space at the moment so it's conceivable that my  
caches are flushed more than normal. Still, it's annoying typesetting  
the documentation and having to wait for ages ever time XeTeX runs it  
through.

And yes, XeTeX documents seem to load a lot slower -- Dick Koch  
thought that this was a bug in TeXShop's rendering code, but I'm less  
convinced since I see similar slowdowns in Preview.

Well, to get back on topic, I'm very sure there's many many  
improvements that could be made in the fontspec documentation, so if  
anyone sees typos, inaccuracies, or poorly/clumsily worded sentences  
and paragraphs, let me know!

Ciao,

Will