On 28 Oct 2005, at 4:34 pm, Laurie Field wrote:
Gentlemen,
I have installed the latest Tex Live, followed by Xetex once again,
and everything works swimmingly. Thank you all, especially
Jonathan, for pinpointing the problem.
On first using xetex, I must remark how slow it is.
It's true that running xetex is a lot slower than running regular tex/
pdftex. A large part of the slowness comes from the Quartz PDF
generation process, as can be demonstrated by running xetex with the
"-no-pdf" option, and xdv2pdf separately.
It shouldn't matter I guess, since one can use plain tex to test a
file during the writing process and only at the final stage use
xetex when proper output is needed. Still, it would be nice to
speed it up, although if the holdup is in ATSUI then we may need to
wait for an OS revision before anything changes.
Yes, an OS revision could potentially help. I have filed a bug report
regarding the main bottleneck in CoreGraphics (Quartz), but don't
know if/when this may be improved.
Another possibility is a new back-end that doesn't rely on CG to
create the PDF at all; this will be needed if XeTeX is ever to become
cross-platform, so there are several reasons to consider such a project.
JK
