[tex-hyphen] luatex and file names

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Mon Aug 10 19:15:54 CEST 2015


On 8/10/2015 6:42 PM, Claudio Beccari wrote:

> Hans says there is no advantage in preloading the patterns into the
> format file. May be he is right for Lua(La)TeX, but one of the reasons
> why I make little use of LuaLaTeX is because of the "long" time luatex
> employs to load the patterns; once loaded, its speed is almost similar
> to that of XeLaTeX; its performances are better for what concerns
> microtype; its functionality with the interaction between the pdf engine
> and the Lua interpreter is exceptional, but if one does not need to use
> the latter functionality, it is not worth waiting that "long" time when
> one has to typeset a text that uses a half dozen languages, and that,
> besides Engish that is preloaded, must load the other five pattern files
> and must create the suitable hash structures so as to use the other
> patterns in an efficient way. I might be completely wrong, but I
> consider this a glitch not an advantage. For certain applications it is
> certainly an advantage, because, for example, it is possible to
> modify/correct the patterns for special needs. But this is not so frequent.

I assume that when you typeset such a document that you also load some 
fonts and that more than a few pages are involved. So the question then 
is: how long does loading patterns take compared to the other tasks that 
tex has to do?

Loading the traditional way (\input some pattern file) takes .3 seconds 
for 42 pattern files totaling 2 Meg. Loading half a dozen files (german, 
brittish, italian, latin, french, german) takes 0.036 seconds on my 
laptop which doesn't sound too bad. And loading the patterns in the 
format file (which includes unzipping) also takes some extra 
microseconds, so we probably end up with some 0.020 sec for 6 patterns.

But anyway, one can of course decide to preload them. My main point is 
that it doesn't save much as luatex doesn't store the hashed patterns 
but the originals and recreates the hash runtime (for good reason, as 
one can also add to the patterns runtime).

Hans

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