[pdftex] can't find the format file

Sun Jan 26 02:40:24 CET 2003

>>>>> "Aime'" == Aime' Fournier <aimefournier at wildmail.com> writes:

    > Folllowing the manual, I did the

    > pdftex -ini -fmt=pdftex plain
This is not sufficient, use texconfig instead.

    > texhash
    > texconfig init

"texconfig init" is all you need.  You do not need to run texhash in
this case because texconfig does this for you.

"texconfig init" recreates all the format files as configured in
fmtutil.cfg and creates all missing symlinks in the bin directory.

Recent teTeX-beta versions also allow "texconfig init pdftex" to
(re)create the plain pdftex format only.

You can edit fmtutil.cfg with "texconfig init formats".

    > My env includes
    > TEXMFCNF=/usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

Usually there is absolutely no need to set any environment variable.
To avoid confusion I recommend to remove all TeX related env vars.

    > and that file exists and contains               
    > TEXFORMATS = .;$TEXMF/web2c                     

What is $TEXMF?  You can find it out with 

  "kpsewhich --expand-var=\$TEXMF". 

    > and the file exists:
    > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 371482 Jan 19 22:00 /usr/share/texmf/web2c/pdftex.fmt

What does "kpsewhich pdftex.fmt" say?

Where does your TeX distribution comes from?  Is it part of a Linux
distribution?  In this case I would expect that it works by default.

How old is your distribution?  If you don't know, what does 
"pdftex --version" say?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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