Taco said:

Duane Johnson wrote:

...

1. Is there a way to keep TeX in-memory (i.e. as a server or daemon process) so that it doesn't have to load and reload fonts and the environment? Our system makes repeated requests for typeset documents and we are wondering if there's a way to remove the overhead of re-running pdftex.

No, there is not (at least not using any of the 'stock' tex distributions). The one thing you could do is preload the fonts and modules you need into the format file, but setting this up is not completely trivial either.

Indeed not trivial. But something I played with once upon a time for much the same purpose. You should take a look at Jonathan Fine's TeX daemon project texd (http://sourceforge.net/projects/texd) if you haven't already - it runs as a pipe (unix) and only loads formats once; it would take a little bit work to get it going reliably with ConTeXt, especially to do so in a way that is easily updated when a new ConTeXt is released, and I'm not sure if Jonathan is still actively working on the project. But it demonstrates an effective approach, which works with Plain (and LaTeX I think). Duncan