Re: [OT] Linux Users

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 20.11.2017 um 09:34 schrieb David Kastrup:
>> Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Am 19.11.2017 um 23:43 schrieb Br. Samuel Springuel:
>>>> On 2017-11-19 5:28 PM, Simon Albrecht wrote:
>>>>> Font selection, language support, UTF-8 input…
>>>> All of these are supported in LuaTeX/LuaLaTeX.
>>>>
>>>> For some key differences see this:
>>>> https://www.overleaf.com/blog/500-whats-in-a-name-a-guide-to-the-many-flavours-of-tex#keyfeatures
>>>>
>>>>
>>> There's one feature that sets LuaLaTeX apart from XeLaTeX for my use
>>> cases, and that's the compatibility of the 'microtype' package. While
>>> it works with XeTeX it offers a limited feature set - and that package
>>> with LuaTeX provides (at least for me) those last 5% of beautiful
>>> typesetting.
>>>
>>> However, this comes at a cost: both XeTeX and LuaTeX work
>>> *substantially* slower than pdfTeX.
>> Which works substantially slower than compiling to DVI and then using
>> dvips or similar.
>>
>>> I'm always stunned how fast "ordinary" compilation can be with LaTeX,
>>> for example when simply pushing a Markdown document through Pandoc.
>> Try compiling the TeX source code to DVI (not! PDF) with plain TeX.
>> That was sort of the definition of a large document in the 80s.
>
> I'll sure do that occasionally
>
>> Makes you wonder where LaTeX spends all its time.
>>
>
> Do you have an idea where it does?

Sure.  It's part of the cost of using TeX as a programming language.
All the important and/or costly things when running plain TeX are
executed in Pascal and the respective data kept there.

But LaTeX does a lot of programming in TeX macros (just take a look at
the difference for \"A or even Ä in some input encoding), and PDFTeX has
to deal with a lot more font data and structure than just the metrics in
the TFM file, and the respective libraries have not been written by
Knuth.

-- 
David Kastrup