[XeTeX] xetex vs. pages

[Suki Venkat, [TnQ]]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 Will Robertson wrote:

> Actually, InDesign arguably is *more* capable than TeX, since it  
> features optical kerning (that is, on-the-fly kerning between any  
> arbitrary characters). This would be something worth investigating  
> for XeTeX if anyone is looking for a research project :)
> 
  Be careful, InDesign's GUI eats your RAM...(unless you have 1 GB RAM)
and is roughly twice slower in Mac OS X than in Windows OS with the same
configuration and InDesign cannot handle glyph substitutions in other
languages like Indic languages.
For speed, it will be interesting to compare the server version of
InDesign (which does the work without the GUI front end) with XeTeX.
This will really show whether they have made any speed-improvements in
the H&J algorithm! InDesign did extend TeX to non-rectangular boxes like
what Karel Skoupý has been trying to do for sometime now.
Someone should try XeTeX vs LaTeX vs Lambda vs InDesign-Server
comparision for speed on a particular configuration of Mac OS 10.x. 
Load the XML in InDesign and LaTeX in others. I expect LaTeX to be the
fastest (as it uses ASCII instead of UTF-8), but it will be interesting
to compare the others.

Suki