Re: Emacs design and architecture

[Werner LEMBERG]

>   > * Texinfo exclusively uses the Computer Modern fonts with its
>   >   7-bit(!)  OT1 font encoding.  This only supports a very
>   >   limited set of (natural) languages with proper hyphenation and
>   >   kerning.
> 
> That is a significant improvement.  Could you confirm that we already
> support output via LaTeX (via texi2any)?

Who is 'we'?  If you mean the Emacs maintainers, I think that nobody
has tried yet to compile the Emacs documentation with the LaTeX
backend, but basically I don't expect any large issues (Eli certainly
knows more).  And sorry, I don't have time for testing a possible
LaTeX compilation by myself.

AFAICS, the whole Emacs documentation (except the tutorials) is
English only; in other words, there is no urgent need to change the
setup right now in any way.

> If so, is the reason people don't always use that due to the time
> cost of running texi2any first?

Compilation time is not an issue currently, I believe.  LaTeX support
in Texinfo is very new and still under heavy development AFAIK.  I
reckon that within the next few years many teams will try – and
possibly change to – the LaTeX front-end.

> How does the soeed if LeTeX compare with the speed of texinfo.tex?

Given that the recent version of `texi2any` is a Perl script, and that
LaTeX itself is slower than Texinfo, I assume that the combination of
the two are *far* slower than a direct call to plain TeX using
`texinfo.tex`.


    Werner