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            <E34AE186-DC93-41E1-BB04-C544FE04FD53@simifilm.ch>
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Message-ID:  <20110102100031.GA2199@khaled-laptop>
Date:         Sun, 2 Jan 2011 12:00:32 +0200
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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From: Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@EGLUG.ORG>
Subject: Re: LaTeX3 and engines
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
In-Reply-To:  <E34AE186-DC93-41E1-BB04-C544FE04FD53@simifilm.ch>
Precedence: list
Status: R

On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 10:31:36AM +0100, Simon Spiegel wrote:
> On 02.01.2011, at 00:07, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> >> As I said earlier, we decided to require \pdfstrcmp after some
> >> applications came up where the alternatives were a bad idea
> >> (difference in expandability with different supported engines). So
> >> this might change as we develop more code. I can only comment on
> >> what we have now, where there is no strong case for dropping support
> >> for pdfTeX. (Indeed, almost all of the day-to-day testing I do uses
> >> pdfTeX as it remains my default engine. LuaTeX is a lot slower, I'm
> >> afraid, quite apart from questions about bugs introduced by the
> >> ongoing changes.)
> > 
> > I'd be interested to know more about this slowness, my own tests shows
> > that luatex 0.60 is just 1.3 to 1.6 as slower as pdftex, not that
> > significant IMO, and that is testing with "stock" format, code written
> > to take advantage of luatex features can be much faster than comparable
> > pdftex code (in context, for example, certain operations are done tens
> > of times faster in luatex than in pdftex).
> 
> Well, I guess it really depends on what you compare. I've done various tests wtih lualatex, fontspec and OpenType fonts and for me this setup is way slower than doing anything comparable with pdftex and Type1 fonts. I do of course realize that it's not fair to compare these things since they are technically completely different, but at least for me the conclusion was not to use the lualatex/fontspec/OTF combo if not absolutely needed since typesetting was so much slower. This is okay for the last run of an already finished document but for the "casual compiling" while I'm actively working on the document, it's way too slow for me. 

They are not just technically different, also the things you can do with
"lualatex/fontspec/OTF combo" is way beyond what pdftex can do. What I
was asking for is comparing identical tasks as my point is if luatex can
do what pdftex does plus more, then even for people who don't need the
"more" luatex should be fine and we gain the extra functionality for the
people who need it. (This is mainly because I've see many people
reluctant to use xetex because they need pdftex features that it does
not).

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer