[XeTeX] xelatex.fmt not found

[Jonathan Kew]

On 13 Oct 2006, at 9:45 am, Bernhard Barkow wrote:

> Hi,
>
> since installing the latest TeX update with i-installer a few days
> ago, I receive the following errror message when trying to comple a
> document with xelatex (in TeXShop):
>
> This is XeTeX, Version 3.141592-2.2-0.995 (Web2C 7.5.5)
> kpathsea: Running mktexfmt xelatex.fmt
> fmtutil: format directory `/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/web2c'
> is not writable.
> I can't find the format file `xelatex.fmt'!
>
> When trying to create xelatex.fmt manually using
> sudo fmtutil-sys --fmtdir /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/web2c --
> byfmt=xelatex
> an error occurs in the Hungarian hyphenation patterns (encoding
> problems?):
> ...
> (/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/generic/hyphen/huhyphn.tex
> Huhyphn - hungarian hyphenation patterns v20031107
> ! Nonletter.
> l.33 .ad<E0><B1><B1>
>             s
> ?
> ! Emergency stop.
> l.33 .ad<E0><B1><B1>
>             s
> End of file on the terminal!
> ...
>
> Since I don't know a lot (i.e., almost nothing) about the basic
> foundations of TeX formats, I thought someone might have a helpful
> hint how to overcome this problem [disabling these Hungarian
> hyphenation patterns would be a viable alternative for now, since I
> know even less Hungarian, but I guess this wouldn't solve the actual
> problem...].

You're exactly right, this is an encoding issue related to the  
huhyphn.tex file, which is not compatible with xetex.

The simplest workaround, if you don't need Hungarian support, is to  
disable it in the language.dat file; I believe you can do this  
through i-Installer's "expert" configuration option. Or you can  
create an empty file named "huhyphn.tex" in the current directory,  
before running fmtutil-sys; then this will be read instead of the  
real one, and you'll get a Hungarian language defined but no  
hyphenation support.

A proper fix that enables the Hungarian patterns to be loaded by  
xelatex should be included in the TeXLive 2006 release, and should  
then trickle down into other distributions that are based on TL, but  
for now things are a little messy.

(I wonder if there's been a recent change to the language  
configuration in the TeX i-Package, as I don't think this used to  
happen with a default installation.)

JK