[tlbuild] Building pdfLAtex with texlive

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 22 March 2018 at 22:11, pilot constatinus wrote:
> Hi, dear texlive. I was wondering how can i build pdflatex, a latex compiler
> for pdf. Even if i built my tl with ./configure --enable-all-pkgs, under
> texk/web2c there is no pdflatex, only pdftex and some other tools. Can you
> help me?

pdflatex is just a symlink to pdftex.

You cannot use pdflatex in isolation, you need a TeX distribution for
that (with all the latex style files, fonts, settings and plenty of
other stuff). The TeX distribution sets up most of the stuff that's
needed for pdflatex to work. The details of how exactly this is done
is out of scope for this (building binaries) mailing list.

If you would like to know more, it might be better to write on the
main TeX Live mailing list, but please also write what exactly you
want to achieve and why you want to build it yourself. Then people
will be able to help you further. Explaining how to create a working
pdflatex from scratch is slightly too complex to explain in a single
email (one could, but I'm almost sure that you would then not use it).

Mojca