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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Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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