On 1 Feb 2007, at 1:51 pm, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
If you have someone to blame, please blame me. I asked Hans if he could add an additional switch -output-driver="xdvipdfmx" when running XeTeX. This means that the files are now converted to pdf with xdvipdfmx instead of xdv2pdf. Without that switch one cannot use otf fonts that reside in the texmf tree.
Right. But xdvipdfmx is also faster than xdv2pdf, in most cases. It may be that older ConTeXt scripts didn't run an xdv-to-pdf converter at all until the last of several passes; if you call xetex with the -no-pdf switch on all the preliminary runs, it will skip the conversion and therefore be faster. But I'm not sure exactly how Hans has been doing all this; ConTeXt is a mysterious black box, as far as I'm concerned!
That change has happened in the middle of January, so any older ConTeXt probably still runs with xdv2pdf. People on the XeTeX mailing list often ask how to run xelatex with -output-driver="xdvipdfmx" switch from emacs etc.
I hope that ConTeXt will soon use OpenType LM as the default font, so particularly for that reason, I doubt that switching back to xdv2pdf makes sense. How long is the time delay if you compare the two?
Something else to consider: if you repeat the test, are the results still the same? There can be a considerable extra delay on the first run after you change anything about your font configuration, because Apple Type Services has to rebuild a lot of cached information. But if you re-run the job, it may be a lot faster. JK