[pdftex] Generating Pdftex.fmt

[Ryan F. Shelley]

I'm new to pdftex, to say the least.  I have a process that was handed down
to me with nearly zero documentation.  Part of the process is taking a tex
file and converting it to pdf.  The documentation says to use "pdflatex",
however, it seems that the actual program is "pdftex".  I'm not given any
instructions on whether I should be running pdftex with any command-line
options.  When I run pdftex and supply the path to the .tex file I have, I
get the following message:

kpathsea: Running mktexfmt pdftex.fmt
mktexfmt: No such file or directory
I can't find the format file `pdftex.fmt'!

I looked around for "mktexfmt" and I can't find it.  Any suggestions?

I also don't know what version I should be using, since this process is
several years old.  Hopefully things are backward compatible :\

Thanks!