new beta / faster + some mp/unicode/pdf features included

new beta / faster + some mp/unicode/pdf features included

[Hans Hagen]

Hi All, 

There is a new beta release. Apart from some fixes, there are some major
additions: 

(1) I one of his mind cracking close reading of a \tracingall'd log file,
Taco uncovered some redundant calls to spacing setup macros. Some testing
learned that by isolating the defaults in separate macros, font switching
could be sped up noticably, that is, if you do lots of \switchtobodyfont
calls. When you use a few of them per page (like in headings) you may
expect a saving of 5-10 percent runtime. 

(2) After that, i decided to go over the critical parts of the source [a
rather dull exercise i do now and then] and i was able to speed up a few
more low level macros. Depending on what you do you can expect a faster
run. Some docs ran some 10 percent faster here, but then I took the onces
that used those features. 

(3) Actually, most of the low level macros are pretty fast already. Even at
first sight savings in macro size of parameter passing, shows no
improvement in 100K loops, so we're reaching some limits. But, i expect to
find a few more places [and run some other improvements here already]. 

(4) I finaly moved a significantly faster special handler into the core,
but again, this only speeds up when you use lots of specisls [in a 2000
page doc with menus you may expect 200.000 calls or more so there it pays
off].

(5) When you have docs with hundreds of fields that have copies or clones,
you will be glad that there is a new field reference handler deep down in
the core. It made my 2000 page test run go down from 1350 seconds to 950
seconds. [before all the optimisations it took 1830 seconds to run this
rather complicated document]. 

(6) The next improvement is an important one for METAPOST users. It may be
known that when put in a form, pdf cropping can get in the way. I think
that i finally found a nice trick around it. So, if you're in for a try,
you may want to add the following to your cont-sys.tex file: 

 \def\objectoffset{1cm}

When things work our will, this will become the default. [You can set the
mp offset independently, but it takes this value as default].

(7) There are a few more improvements, but i hesitate to move them into the
beta now. 

(8) There is now, specially for Petr Ferdus cum suis, support for unicode
pdf font resource vectors 

\useencoding[pfr]   % (pre)load pdf font resource support
\setupbodyfont[csr] % reload the (in this case czech) font

will do the trick, and if you are really in for a nightmare, take a look at
pdfr-il2. If you don't get what i'm talking about, forget about it since
this is a feature for those who suffer from weak search engines and know
what it's about. 

(9) For Wang Lei and friends i moved the unicode remapping macros into the
core. This will make testing more convenient [also for korean which is in
the make]; later we will sort out a proper switch to enable it more
conveniently, but I have to think it over since it's yet another dimension
to the font space. 

(10) Some day soon I'll move some \show... macros from the core to module
which is automatically loaded when needed, so that the core fmt file will
be a bit smaller [not that much, probably a few hundred k]. 

So, go ahead, and let me know where it fails. 

Hans   
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                                                  Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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