Hi,
On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 7:58 PM Shiv Shankar Dayal
In comparison to LaTeX with LuaHBTeX, ConTeXt with LuaMetaTeX is lightning fast.
pdfTeX is 8bit, and Knuth’s plain TeX is very low level – for a fairer comparison, try the TeXbook on LuaMetaTeX (I don’t know if “plain” works though).
I understand that why it is slow, but the problem is that the difference is too high. My book has lots of math, so perhaps that is the reason.
For what it is worth, I have a math book (lots of math and references back and forth and some figures) and the 300 pages compiles in around 10s, so 30 pages/s. I don't have too much to compare with, and that is a bit slower than your 40 pages/s (but 40*30 is 1200 and not 450), but I consider that pretty fast. One thing you can try is \enableexperiments[fonts.compact] (as it sounds, it is still experimental). Also, if you do not provide any example code, it will be difficult for people to guess how _you_ can speed up your compilation (if at all). /Mikael