[XeTeX] public xelatex.fmt

[maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu]

Last year, I installed xe(la)tex from the TeXLive distribution, and ran
it.  I had to create the Unicode versions of the hyphenation files, as
described at
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex_faq#xelatex
in order for the xelatex.fmt file to build.

(BTW, the description there is a little vague.  I find two sets of what I
assume to be hyphenation files in the texlive distro--at least both sets
end in '.hyp': /groups/tools/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/latex/ and
/groups/tools/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/context/patterns/.  Also, if I
do want to create UTF-8 versions of the hyphenation files, rather than
editing the language.dat file to eliminate those languages, it's not
entirely clear to me what the source encoding is; I'm assuming ISO-8859-1,
but that's doubtless wrong for some languages.  Maybe the texlive distro
could come with the UTF-8 versions as well?  And the xelatex.fmt build
process would know where to look for the right encoded files in the
distro.)

Coming back to my real problem: recently, we re-installed xetex for all
users, not just for me.  Unfortunately, the resulting xelatex.fmt file
(and I suppose the xetex.fmt file) would up in a .texlive2007 subdir of
only one user, meaning the rest of us can't run xelatex.

Obviously we could copy that .texlive2007 subdir and send it to everyone. 
But surely there is a better way--maybe putting it under /etc or
something? And calling it .texlive2007 doesn't sound like a good idea,
either, since this is now 2008...  Where does xe(la)tex (or kpsewhich????)
look for these files?

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD