[XeTeX] "I can't find the format file `xetex.fmt'!"

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 Oct 2005, at 10:42 pm, Florian Grammel wrote:
> <snip>
> But then my attempts to install XeTeX kept failing. Actually  
> xetex.fmt was properly installed and working, but not xelatex.fmt,  
> even though the installer didn't report any mistakes.
> The log said i.a.:
>> ...
>> (/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/generic/hyphen/gahyph.tex
>> Hyphenation patterns `gahyph.tex' Version 1.0 <2004/01/22>
>> ! Not a letter.
>> l.6089 ...rt뉧coirt뉣hreata뉧creata뉤hoirte
>>                                                   hoirtear
>> ?
>> ! Emergency stop.
>> l.6089 ...rt뉧coirt뉣hreata뉧creata뉤hoirte
>>                                                   hoirtear
>> End of file on the terminal!
>
>
> It finally worked when I again removed the xetex-files from web2c,  
> deactivated Irish hyphenation in language.dat and reinstalled XeTeX.

This is because the gahyph.tex file includes text in an 8-bit  
codepage, not Unicode, and so the characters are not interpreted  
correctly by XeTeX when it reads the file.

For some languages, I've shipped modified, Unicode-compatible  
hyphenation files with XeTeX, but that's one I haven't looked at yet.  
I'll try to remember to include it next time I do an update. As it  
seems to use ISO-8859-1 encoding, it's simple to fix, without  
affecting other TeX engines that read it: just replace the literal  
accented characters in the \hyphenation exceptions with ^^xx codes  
(like those used in the \patterns).

JK
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