[tex-live] pdfeTex vs. pdfLaTeX.

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2011 at 03:04:26PM +0000, Cedric Ginestet wrote:

> I have several packages (tikz, trackchanges, caption, multicol,
> multirow) that use up some counters. I compile all my documents with
> pdflatex. How can I use pdfetex instead of pdflatex to compile them?
> 
> I have Ubuntu's Koala, AucTex on Emacs. So far, if I simply try to
> use pdfetex from the command line, I get an error, which looks like
> if I were using bare TeX:
> ##########################
> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
>  restricted \write18 enabled.
> entering extended mode

The last line means that the e-TeX extensions are available.
Probably your pdflatex shows the same. Since several years
pdflatex is also using e-TeX.

> I read somewhere that using eTeX should solve my problem of
> counters! What am I doing wrong?

\usepackage{etex}

It redefines the allocation macros to make use of the new
registers.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek