[XeTeX] How to manually create the xelatex.fmt?

Ulrike Fischer news3 at nililand.de
Tue Oct 18 16:09:08 CEST 2011


Am Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:43:59 -0700 schrieb Chris Travers:

>> Users also don't like to discover that the publishers' LaTeX
>> format they need won't work with the distro TeX, or that a
>> document that formats correctly on a co-author's Mac or Windows
>> system won't format on their linux system. The TeX ecosystem
>> needs some reasonable limits on how long old versions should be
>> supported.  If users can't get adequate support from their
>> distro there are better supported alternatives.


> Given that server software that I work with usually has at least a
> five year support cycle, what are those reasonable limits?

Well you error message said 

"! LaTeX source files more than 5 years old!.

So the limit is five years (but only for the latex kernel). 
The version date of my (current) latex.ltx ist
\edef\fmtversion{2011/06/27} 
 
> Or is XeTeX not intended to be used in these environments?

I would say that if your latex is more than five years old, your
xetex binaries and packages aren't up-to-date either. And as xetex
is rather young this can be quite a problem. Regardless if you want
to ship out only xetex documents or xetex documents + binaries: You
should be aware that other people can have up-to-date systems and so
you should make tests on such systems too (and just in case you
don't know:  you can't use a fmt generated by one xetex version with
another xetex version).

-- 
Ulrike Fischer 



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