Re: Recommendations for Speed?

[Duncan Hothersall <dh@capdm.com>]

Taco said:
> Duane Johnson wrote:
>   
>> 1. Is there a way to keep TeX in-memory (i.e. as a server or daemon  
>> process) so that it doesn't have to load and reload fonts and the  
>> environment?  Our system makes repeated requests for typeset  
>> documents and we are wondering if there's a way to remove the  
>> overhead of re-running pdftex.
>>     
>
> No, there is not (at least not using any of the 'stock' tex
> distributions). The one thing you could do is preload the fonts
> and modules you need into the format file, but setting this up
> is not completely trivial either.
>   
Indeed not trivial. But something I played with once upon a time for 
much the same purpose. You should take a look at Jonathan Fine's TeX 
daemon project texd (http://sourceforge.net/projects/texd) if you 
haven't already - it runs as a pipe (unix) and only loads formats once; 
it would take a little bit work to get it going reliably with ConTeXt, 
especially to do so in a way that is easily updated when a new ConTeXt 
is released, and I'm not sure if Jonathan is still actively working on 
the project. But it demonstrates an effective approach, which works with 
Plain (and LaTeX I think).

Duncan
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