[XeTeX] Some fontspec details

[Jonathan Kew]

On 2 Dec 2004, at 9:17 am, Will Robertson wrote:

> Luckily XeTeX is slow enough that inefficiencies in my package don't 
> seem to show up too much :)

Wonderful comment, Will.... I laughed out loud! :)

You'd have to work pretty hard to have a serious impact on overall 
performance, I think, given that your package deals with one-time setup 
operations rather than "inner-loop" stuff within the typesetting 
process.

Actually, I'm surprised I haven't had a ton of complaints re 
performance, and it's something I'd love to improve. Currently, 
Quartz-based PDF generation is the worst bottleneck; if you run xetex 
-no-pdf you'll find that the actual formatting process isn't so bad. 
It's xdv2pdf that really drags things down. I've done some profiling, 
which indicates that an awful lot of the time is spent on low-level 
glyph access within the PDF-generating backend of Quartz. :(

JK