[XeTeX] Problem solved

[Jonathan Kew]

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