[XeTeX] [tex-live] TeX Live 2014

[Philip Taylor]

Philip Taylor wrote:

> Advance notice of a question to be posted tomorrow :
>
> On my main machine, I run TeX Live in a VM with 3340Gb of memory. My
> main project at the moment relies on PDF image inclusion by XeTeX.
> Changing the "V" parameter from "5" to "6" in my local copy of
> "dvipdfmx.cfg" not only suppresses a large number of messages about
> "Version of PDF file is greater than ..." (one for each image file) but
> also speeds up compilation by a factor of about 10.
>
> On this new machine, I have no VMs but I still have 4Gb of memory.  TeX
> Live 2014 does not whinge about "Version of PDF file is greater than
> ..." with "V 5" in the default "dvipdfmx.cfg" (good) but increasing "V
> 5" to "V 6" or even "V 7" makes no difference whatsoever to the
> compilation speed, which becomes depressingly slow as soon as the first
> image inclusion is encountered.
>
> I will try to document this better tomorrow, but in the mean time can
> anyone think of any reason why TeX Live 2013 XeTeX should be able to
> process my document ten times faster than TeX Live 2014 so long as I
> increase "V 5" to "V 6" in a local copy of "dvipdfmx.cfg" whilst the
> latter makes no difference whatsoever in TeX Live 2014 ?

I think I now know the answer to this question.  It would seem that the 
TeX run-time system was unaware of the existence of a new instance of 
"dvipdfmx.cfg" in D:\TeX\Live\2014\TeXMF\Local\dvipdfmx and thus was not 
honouring it.  Thinking (wrongly) that the TeX run-time system 
maintained a database for the contents of TEXINPUTS (to which I had 
added the location of the image files, to overcome the lack of access to 
environment variables from a XeTeX \input statement), I ran the TeX Live 
manager and instructed it to "Update filename database"; once this was 
done, the speed-up expected from increasing "V 5" to "V 6" was 
immediately realised.

** Phil.