Over the last year, the code base of the filter module has matured considerably. Now, the module has all the features that I wanted when I started with it about a year and a half back. The last remaining limitation (in my eyes, at least) was that caching of results required a call to external programs (mtxrun) to calculate md5 hashes; as such, caching was slow. That is no longer the case. Now (since early December), md5 sums are calculated at the lua end, so there is no time penalty for caching. As a result, in MkIV, recompiling is much faster for documents having lots of external filter environments with caching enabled(i.e., environments defined with continue=yes option).
Update for the filter module: faster caching
08 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in ConTeXt
