On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Hans Hagen<[email protected]> wrote: > Yue Wang wrote: > >> If there are sufficient funding, write such binding is beneficial. > > depends ... 99% of dev in the tex world is not funded and still beneficial > > anyway, it's not on our agenda so such a lib + binding would end up in the > add-ons activities later on; also, such a library should just expose data > which then could be transformed to something else using lua, i.e. it makes > no sense to let such a lib construct a fontforge like table > > actually, if the advantage is sought in faster loading keep in mind that > it's the construction of the big tables that take runtime, and that will be > true for all fontloaders (only faster processors and more mem can solve > that; it's the price for flexibility and in the luatex project flexibility > and opening up is more important than runtime; as such luatex will always be > much slower than the other engines and fonts is just one aspect) (we have a > few ideas for speedups but these might not show up before version 1.0) >
Li Yanrui's profile results confirms my opinion: during font loading, Lua uses very short time to build tables. most of the time are used by fontforge (parsing fonts and calculating). see http://yuleopen.googlepages.com/prof.txt and it is difficult to optimize fontforge there are several, not just one or two, functions takes very long time to execute. > the standard built-in fontloader datastructures are quite specific and will > stay close to what fontforge does if only because it makes developing fonts > as well as debugging lua code easier (for instance same internal feature > interfaces) while other fontlibs might have a completely different exposure > of font characteristics > > Hans > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE > Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands > tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com > | www.pragma-pod.nl > ----------------------------------------------------------------- >
