[XeTeX] XeTeX 0.99 released

[Stephen Moye]

On Dec 6, 2005, at 6:33 PM, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 6 Dec 2005, at 11:25 pm, Stephen Moye wrote:
>>>
>>> I can understand a somewhat slower startup, perhaps, if you have  
>>> very large numbers of fonts installed; how many does Font Book  
>>> report? Still, I wouldn't have thought it should be that bad.
>>
>> I am now working on my computer at home and everything is fine and  
>> working as expected. I have recently been required to install  
>> Norton AntiVirus at work. It seems to slow just about everything  
>> down -- I will run a few tests tomorrow to see if, as I suspect,  
>> this is the culprit.
>
> That's very suspicious. I haven't touched NAV in years, partly  
> because of such negative experiences with it in much earlier versions.
>
> During startup (actually, the first time you ask it to load a non- 
> TFM-based font), XeTeX actually accesses every font you have  
> installed in your system; it has to do this in order to deal with  
> things like the /B and /I modifiers, and especially optical sizing.  
> (It can't know which fonts are part of an "optical family" without  
> actually reading some of the tables.) I suspect NAV is intercepting  
> all these accesses and that's costing a lot of time.

What do you use?

>
> A possible future optimization may help by caching some of this  
> information, and detecting whether the font configuration has  
> changed since the last run.... though this is complicated by the  
> fact that if you use any legacy TeX fonts, xdv2pdf has to  
> "activate" these in order to render them through Quartz. But it's  
> something I'm thinking about....

Sounds interesting, but nowhere near as interesting as enabling XeTeX  
to use uninstalled fonts... hint, hint... {8>}
>
> JK
>
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