[pdftex] Plain TeX commands.

[Robert Howlett]

Hans Hagen wrote:

> John R. Culleton wrote:
>
>> Pdftex is based on the original TeX plus plain.tex combination as
>> described in the TeXbook. In pdftex some of the functionality of
>> older plain.tex commands has been replaced by newer ones. An example is
>> \hoffset which is no longer needed.
>> My question is this: laying aside \special commands for the
>> moment, are there plain TeX cammands that no longer exist at all
>> in pdftex? Is there a list of them somewhere?
>
>
> pdftex is just s super set of tex, so all primitives are there; plain 
> is a macro package and when loaded on top of pdftex, you have the same 
> functionality as with normal tex
>
> Hans
>
>
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One source of confusion here, I believe, is that -- at least in some current
TeX distibutions -- the file that ought to be called plain.fmt (because 
it is
created by dumping the macros in plain.tex to a format file) is in fact
called tex.fmt. Similarly, pdftex is usually distributed with a format file
called pdftex.fmt, which is created via pdftex -ini  plain.tex (or some
such). I think that pdftex.fmt really should be called pdfplain.fmt, or
something of the sort.

Bob Howlett