[tex-live] pdftex without language.dat?

[Hartmut Henkel]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Karl Berry wrote:

>     is it mandatory that the pdftex format is created without loading
>     language.dat? Political reasons, sentiments? Does [loading] it
>     hurt?
>
> Didn't we just have this thread?

ooops, i didn't follow the thread close enough, sorry.

> No, it's not mandatory, as far as I know.  In fact, I just proposed
> changing it, and actually did change fmtutil.cnf, but then Artemio
> pointed out that changing fmtutil.cnf was insufficient, and pdftex.ini
> also has to be changed to load etex.src (I assume).  That seemed one
> step too many to me, but heck, at this point, I don't care, it's fine
> with me.
>
> Maybe you could do it?

yes, i tried it, wanted multiple languages in plain pdftex. But i
learned that it's not enough only to put language.dat into fmtutil.cnf.
Now i have added/committed yet missing pdfbplain.ini, so that the
following is possible:

pdftex pdftex language.dat -translate-file=cp227.tcx *pdfbplain.ini

(without etex) but i won't add this line into fmtutil.cnf, as there
might be objections.

Btw, what does the language.dat entry in fmtutil.cnf do? Seems nothing?
It's only to trigger rebuilding?

Regards, Hartmut