Wolfgang Schuster wrote:
Yes I did this and I changed my font settings for the title page to \definedfont in my document takes now 80 seconds for a single run but it spends most of the time for font loading.
much overhead is related to things like setting up math, synchronizing encodings, mappings, (and hz, protruding if enabled) .. keep in mind that we're talking of font systems, not one font
But you can beat the process time of plain TeX which can be used in simple documents where you can reduce the time with a few tricks. My process time for vocabulary cards from a xml file is below 1 second and I have more than 4.000 pages ;-) Doing the same thing woth ConTeXt's old xml interface and XeTeX takes 30 seconds and I won't talk about mkiv.
it all depends on what functionality is needed (take pagebody construction, which in plain is hardly present, backgrounds, color, etc etc) and in the case of xml it also depends on what 'defineXML' commands are used; things like namespaces (fallbacks), attributes etc etc ... many things play a role and i'm pretty sure that the critical parts of context are quite optimized; for sure many (simple) docs can be processed using plain tex but as soon as you need a bit more ... (btw, xml in mkiv is quite different, since it operates on trees) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------