Jonathan Kew wrote:
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!
i don't think that the backend issue will slwo down things much, but it may be that there is some slow path searching involved which can be traces by setting the right kpse switches (that i always forget and cannot quote now) 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------