On 16/03/2020 20:27, Henri Menke wrote: >> Now, there is more data being loaded today than when I did that work, and >> some of it is in LuaTeX so could be done Lua-only. It's also possible that >> the Perl script was sub-optimal, or that as part of a general 'install' >> function the time would not really show. However, XeTeX needs the data, so >> one is still looking at having to explicitly pre-process in Lua. Moreover, >> most of the time taken for format-building is not about reading Unicode >> data. With LuaTeX, pre-loading expl3 does cut out a slight 'stall' when >> loading everything for case-changing, but having a LuaTeX and a XeTeX path >> separately is not attractive. > > Is there any distribution that doesn't have LuaTeX in the default > installation? (Apart from exotic things like TeX Live infra-only) Then > it would be conceivable to just make LuaTeX a hard requirement and > process the Unicode data on the fly instead of going via CTAN. There's KerTeX ... but that's not got XeTeX either I think (and doesn't have the pdfTeX utility primitives). Certainly one could pre-digest at the format-building stage, or perhaps as a post-update action for the Unicode data files. However, there's still the fact that even reading a 'pre-digested' file takes non-zero time. >> As format-building is all about saving time for 'normal' runs, I'm not >> seeing there is a massive need to speed up the process. I know there is one >> engine in development that doesn't use format files, so that might be a >> place to consider things, but I think we'd need a strong case to alter the >> approach for XeTeX/LuaTeX (pdfTeX, ...). > > Are you referring to JSBox? I doubt that this will every be public. Yes, JSBox is what I have in mind. Joseph