Re: [xsl] Using Saxon 2.0 with FOP, XEP, Antenna House

[Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 17 Oct 2013, at 12:53, Jesper Tverskov wrote:

> Thanks for helping me understand how speed is determined in the full
> process from XML to XSLFO to PDF.
>
> In the case of the fast speed of Antenna House at the command line, I
> must conclude that it is MSXML that does the difference.
>
> The .Net version of Saxon 9 takes 4s to transform to xslfo
> at the command line (in my case the xslfo is very small, later to be
> transformed to a pdf of a couple of pages).
>
> The msxsl.exe version of MSXML takes 0.4s to transform to xslfo at the
> command line. Much, much, much faster!
>

If you want to know how much of the time is start-up time and how much is
actually spent doing the transformation, then run Saxon from the command line
with -repeat:50 and -t, to get an average time. This will give you an
indication of how long the task would take if you were able to run it in a VM
that was already "warmed up".

On the other hand, if you don't have any other way to do the integration other
than using the command line, then this information is (sadly) of little use to
you!

But if you're creating a batch of 800 of these small xsl-fo files that need
transforming, then it might be a lot better to write them to disk, and then
transform the whole lot in a single Saxon run (e.g. by using the capability on
the Saxon command line to transform a whole directory at once.)

Michael Kay
Saxonica