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

Subject: Re: [xsl] Using Saxon 2.0 with FOP, XEP, Antenna House
From: Jesper Tverskov <jesper@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 13:53:03 +0200
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!

I can only conclude that if different FO-processors are equally fast,
the one using MSXML will be much, much faster at the command line for
a small pdf job of a couple of pages.

If the pdf is huge on the other hand, thousands of page with a lot of
images, the extremely fast startup time of MSXML is irrelevant. Then
the speed is determined by the FO-processor.

Since my client only have this one, small pdf, created at the
command line 7-800 at a time (a very small number by the way), it is
meaningless to upgrade to XSLT 2.0 as long as the command line
interface is used.

In my case XSLT 2.0 is only relevant if I drop the command line and
use the .NET or Java API instead, but my hunch is that it will only
narrow the time gap..

Does it make sense? Or have I misunderstood something?

Regards
Jesper Tverskov
http://www.xmlplease.com

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Very interesting. So you tell me that when the AH command line
>> interface get this line in a bat file:
>>
>> AHFCmd -d input.xml  -i AHFSettings.xml  -s stylesheet.xsl  -o output.pdf
>>
>> the AHFCmd.exe is in reality a "faked" or "improved" command line
>> interface?
>
> Not necessarily "faked". It might just be a very small executable that links to an already-loaded DLL - running that would be far faster that initializing a Java VM.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica

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