3 ms·
The reason I switched from LuaTeX, which I agree is otherwise superior (and...the Lua thing!), is that it has some horrible and well-known bug in its font loadi
by leephillips 5y ago
The reason I switched from LuaTeX, which I agree is otherwise superior (and...the Lua thing!), is that it has some horrible and well-known bug in its font loading mechanism, where if you load a large number of fonts, it sucks up enormous memory and CPU resources. I have documents that simply grind to a halt if I try to process them with LuaTeX, but compile in seconds using XeLaTeX. I hope that’s fixed now, because I would rather use LuaTeX.
- zauguin 5y agoThe issue is not so much about many fonts, but about one big font. The first time a font is loaded it has to be analyzed and cached and for some fonts this leads to excessive resource usage. You can avoid that in recent versions by using a HarfBuzz based font-shaper instead of the Lua version: Replace `\setmainfont{Some name}` with `\setmainfont[Renderer=HarfBuzz]{Some name}`. The first time a bug font is used you might still see a slight delay (~1 second?), but it's orders of magnitude faster and does not require so much resources.
- leephillips 5y agoI’ll try it! Thanks a million!