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Performance Considerations

When processing large documents or documents with many formatting operations, performance can become an important consideration. This chapter describes various strategies to optimize the typesetting speed of the speedata Publisher.

HTML Parsing

One of the most significant performance factors is HTML parsing in paragraphs. By default, the Publisher parses HTML tags like <b>, <i>, <span>, etc. in all text content. This parsing happens for every paragraph and can be expensive, especially in documents with many small text blocks.

Disabling HTML Parsing

If your document does not use HTML formatting tags, you can significantly improve performance by disabling HTML parsing:

Global Setting

To disable HTML parsing for the entire document, use the <Options> command:

<Options html="off"/>

This can reduce typesetting time by up to 40% in documents with many paragraphs.

Local Setting

You can also control HTML parsing on a per-paragraph basis:

<Paragraph html="off">
  <Value>Text without HTML formatting</Value>
</Paragraph>

HTML Parsing Modes

The html attribute supports three values:

all
Parse HTML in all paragraphs (default behavior).
inner
Parse HTML only in child elements of the current data element.
off
Disable HTML parsing completely. This provides the best performance but HTML tags like <b> or <i> will not be interpreted.

Command Line Option

You can also set the HTML parsing mode from the command line:

sp --option html=off

This is particularly useful for batch processing or testing performance optimizations.

When to Use html=“off”

Consider disabling HTML parsing when:

  • Your data contains no HTML formatting tags
  • Text formatting is handled entirely through text formats
  • You are processing large documents with many paragraphs
  • Performance is critical and you don’t need inline HTML formatting

When to Keep HTML Parsing Enabled

Keep HTML parsing enabled when:

  • Your data contains HTML tags like <b>, <i>, <span>, etc.
  • You need inline formatting within paragraphs
  • You are using CSS styles with HTML elements
  • Document generation time is not critical

Size of the working directory

When the Publisher starts, it reads the working directory including all subdirectories and stores the file names (see File organization). A few thousand files are not a problem, but very large directory trees slow down the start noticeably. Keep the working directory lean and only put files there that the Publisher really needs. With sp --no-local the recursive search can be switched off; --extra-dir adds specific directories.

Image sizes

Very large image files slow down processing and increase the size of the PDF file. If the full resolution is not needed, it pays off to downscale the images beforehand. Alternatively, the dpi option on PDFOptions limits the resolution in the PDF, and the resize handler (Pro plan) can adapt images automatically.

Bidirectional text

The bidi attribute on the <Options> command enables the analysis of the writing direction so that left-to-right and right-to-left text can be mixed. This analysis takes time. Only enable it if the document actually contains mixed writing directions.