[texhax] inconsistency between pdftex and tex

Pierre MacKay mackay at cs.washington.edu
Mon Oct 20 16:52:09 CEST 2003


Ian Collier has stated with more detail and precision what I was
trying to get across.  The restrictions on the use of the
name TeX are meant to cover what happens when either virtex
or initex is invoked and the plain.fmt format is loaded.

Wrappers which do convenient hair-combing and manicuring tasks
should not affect that performance.  Virtex, after all is not much
use until at least some format is loaded, and if you load something
that is not plain.fmt, you can induce all sorts of wierd behaviour,
none of which will alter the basic functionality of virtex.  

It would be discourteous to claim that such wierd behaviour was TeX,
however, even though in a strict sense, no damage had been done to the
compiled virtex kernel.

Pierre



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