[OS X TeX] Error message on running fmtutil

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 Dec 2006, at 11:04 am, Peter Dyballa wrote:

>
> Am 11.12.2006 um 10:58 schrieb S P Suresh:
>
>> After a recent upgrade of TeXLive from Gerben's EXPERIMENTAL  
>> directory, I found that xelatex didn't work.
>
> I didn't follow this thread on the TeXLive i-Package too close, but  
> I think it does not provide yet a XeTeX for PPC based Macs, only  
> for intel hardware. I think you would need to compile and install  
> XeTeX yourself ...

This is incorrect; the package does include xetex for ppc.

Moreover, compiling and installing by hand is likely to put files in  
unexpected places, as my install scripts have not yet been updated to  
work with Gerben's experimental packages.

It's clear from the error shown...

> ....
> ! Emergency stop.
> ...
>
> l.7988 \dump
>
> No pages of output.
> Transcript written on xelatex.log.
> Error: `xetex -ini  -jobname=xelatex -progname=xelatex -etex  
> xelatex.ini' failed

...that xetex was present and running, but something went wrong in  
loading the LaTeX macros. My guess is that Gerben got a snapshot of  
TeX Live where some of the files were in an inconsistent state --  
this is a hazard of building packages from the "moving target"  
development sources, rather than waiting for a real release version.

We'd need to see more of the output in order to tell exactly where  
things went wrong, and what might need updating to correct it. My  
guess: the unicode-letters.tex file, loaded by both the xetex and  
xelatex formats, changed between xetex versions 0.995 and 0.996. The  
version for 0.996 was recently added to the TL repository, but the  
xetex binary has not yet been rebuilt. So if Gerben has updated his  
package in the past couple of days, he probably has mismatched  
versions. I'll build new binaries shortly, after which his next  
update should work.

If that's correct, a temporary workaround would be to get a copy of  
unicode-letters.tex from an older package and put in your current  
directory (where it will be found instead of the one in the main  
texmf tree).

JK

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