[tex-live] Format file in quotes not parsed by pdflatex

[Alexander hermes]

> On 17 May 2013 22:25, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org
> <mailto:karl at freefriends.org>> wrote:
>
>          (%&"preamble" given a file preamble.fmt)
>
>     Thanks for the report, but I don't believe that ever worked, or was
>     intended to work, or can reasonably be made to work.  Certainly "..."
>     cannot be used to arbitrarily quote filenames in any circumstance, and
>     this is just one of the cases where it can't.
>
>
> I have little sympathy for spaces in filenames:-), main reason that  I
> suggested
> that it might be worth raising here is that Alexander reported that it
> worked in miktex
> and generally differences between implementations ought possibly be
> known about even
> if they can't be avoided.
>
> certainly It's not a major issue and not worth doing anything about
> unless it was entirely trivial. The number of formats that are not one
> of the standard ones must be vanishingly small anyway, and no one could
> _need_ a space in a format name.
>
> David
>

I myself avoid spaces in filenames for obvious reasons.

However, as David mentioned, it works in MikTeX - I have not tested this 
thoroughly, though. I wonder how it is implemented there...

The reason I came upon this issue was a result of generating a format 
out of my preamble using the mylatexformat.ltx package. The 
documentation very clearly (and repeatedly) uses the syntaxt with 
quotation marks (in the manual example, the format has several spaces).

If the consensus is that this is "never worked, and never will" in 
TL2012 then I suppose the maintainter of said package should be 
contacted to insert a cautionary note.

Alex