[OS X TeX] etex versions

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Mar 2005, at 1:53 pm, Joachim Kock wrote:

> One more tiny question: is this change coincident with the point where
> etex ceased to be an executable on its own and became a wrapper for
> pdfetex, or did there exist versions of pure etex that used .fmt as
> extension?

I believe (I'm sure someone will correct me if necessary) that it is 
still possible, with Web2C 7.5.3, to build a "true" etex executable, 
and this would also use .fmt as the format file extension.

However, teTeX-based distributions, at least, appear to be using the 
single pdfetex executable, running with different options depending on 
the wrapper name. So I don't know how likely it is that you'll actually 
encounter such a version of etex, unless you specifically choose to 
build it.

JK

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