[XeTeX] longer ConTeXt+XeTeX compile time than before

[Jonathan Kew]

On 1 Feb 2007, at 1:51 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

>
> If you have someone to blame, please blame me. I asked Hans if he
> could add an additional switch -output-driver="xdvipdfmx" when running
> XeTeX. This means that the files are now converted to pdf with
> xdvipdfmx instead of xdv2pdf. Without that switch one cannot use otf
> fonts that reside in the texmf tree.

Right. But xdvipdfmx is also faster than xdv2pdf, in most cases.

It may be that older ConTeXt scripts didn't run an xdv-to-pdf  
converter at all until the last of several passes; if you call xetex  
with the -no-pdf switch on all the preliminary runs, it will skip the  
conversion and therefore be faster. But I'm not sure exactly how Hans  
has been doing all this; ConTeXt is a mysterious black box, as far as  
I'm concerned!

> That change has happened in the middle of January, so any older
> ConTeXt probably still runs with xdv2pdf. People on the XeTeX mailing
> list often ask how to run xelatex with -output-driver="xdvipdfmx"
> switch from emacs etc.
>
> I hope that ConTeXt will soon use OpenType LM as the default font, so
> particularly for that reason, I doubt that switching back to xdv2pdf
> makes sense. How long is the time delay if you compare the two?

Something else to consider: if you repeat the test, are the results  
still the same? There can be a considerable extra delay on the first  
run after you change anything about your font configuration, because  
Apple Type Services has to rebuild a lot of cached information. But  
if you re-run the job, it may be a lot faster.

JK