[OS X TeX] Textures Announcement

[Jonathan Kew]

On 10 Mar 2006, at 7:25 am, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
> Well, here on a PowerBook G4 @ 1GHz with gwTeX:
>
>> $ time tex texbook.tex
>> This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.5)
>> [...]
>> Output written on texbook.dvi (494 pages, 2030580 bytes).
>> Transcript written on texbook.log.
>>
>> real    0m6.239s
>> user    0m3.617s
>> sys     0m0.252s

Did you run in \batchmode?
>
> Regarding speed, the only TeX program that feels really slow here  
> is XeTeX. Given that this limitation comes AFAIK from the system  
> calls it (or rather its xdv2pdf companion) does when generating PDF  
> output, I wonder what its speed will be like on a MacBook Pro when  
> an Intel version becomes available (I know than Jonathan Kew, its  
> developer, is working on a Linux version, so that an Intel Mac  
> version might not be the priority right now).

Yes, I know XeTeX is a lot slower than standard TeX; the PDF  
generation via Quartz is a large part of this, and the extra work  
involved in applying AAT or OpenType layout features rather than  
simply looking up fixed character widths in an array is another part.

XeTeX does build and run natively on an Intel Mac, and the user who  
tried this reports speeds that are a LOT faster than my old, slow PPC  
machines can manage. I'm hoping to include Intel binaries next time I  
do a release, but it's a little tricky as I can't build and test them  
myself-- no access to such a machine. So I'll have to rely on someone  
else compiling and testing them, and just bundle the resulting  
executables.

JK

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