[pdftex] pdflatex.fmt file

[Ben Crowell]

Siep wrote:
>You can give an option `--without-x11' to configure to turn off X11
>support. Maybe you also need --without-xdvik and --without-oxdvik.
Thanks, Siep, that worked! I can now run the pdflatex binaryy.

Now I have a second problem, and I'd be grateful for help.

Previously, what's worked for me when I wanted to install pdftex was
to copy the pdftex.pool file from tug.org, and then generate the pdflatex.fmt
file like this:
  $ pdftex -ini -fmt=pdflatex
  **\input latex.ltx
Then I copy the pdflatex.fmt file to the texmf/web2c directory. This worked
on Linux with teTeX (and I think it also works on MacOS X). (I've never had
much luck with texconfig. It crashed on Linux, and on FreeBSD it's complaining
that it can't find the language.dat file.)

The first problem I'm running into on this FreeBSD/TeXLive install is that the above
procedure creates a latex.fmt file rather than a pdflatex.fmt file. Is this a
difference between TeXlive and teTeX? On my teTeX/Mac system, it makes pdflatex.fmt,
but on TeXlive/FreeBSD, the very same command produces latex.fmt.

If I run pdflatex, it tries to create the missing .fmt file by doing the following
command:
  pdftex -ini -jobname=pdflatex -progname=pdflatex pdflatex.ini
This command does indeed create pdflatex.fmt, but pdflatex then dies anyway:
  This is pdfeTeXk, Version 3.14159-1.10b-2.1 (Web2C 7.4.5)
   %&-line parsing enabled.
  (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

In a TeXlive installation, where is the pdflatex.fmt file supposed to
go? /usr/TeX/texmf/web2c? /usr/TeX/texmf-var/web2c? The latter is where
pdftex puts it, but that doesn't seem to help. It still acts the same way
the next time I run pdftex: tries to create the file again, and then dies again
with the same error message.

Would I be better off just going back and installing teTeX? Or could these
new problems be because I'm using a bleeding-edge pdftex (1.10b)?

I've been google searching and poking around www.tug.org/texlive for
documentation -- is there some information somewhere that I should be
reading? Does anyone have any ideas what could be going wrong here,
or how to debug my setup?

Thanks in advance!


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