[XeTeX] public xelatex.fmt

[maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu]

Mojca wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 4:57 PM,  <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> In TeX Live 2007, it should build already without any problems (maybe
> not witout mistakes, but that's something else). I wonder why you had
> to follow those (old) instructions that were true before TeX Live 2007
> in order to make it work.

Maybe I'm doing s.t. wrong.  When I try to run xelatex on an input doc,
here's some of what I get (lines that I believe to be irrelevant are
omitted here):
----------------Begin Run-----------------
> xelatex BengaliGrammar.xetex
This is XeTeXk, Version 3.141592-2.2-0.996 (Web2C 7.5.6)
 %&-line parsing enabled.
kpathsea: Running mktexfmt xelatex.fmt
fmtutil: running `xetex -ini   -jobname=xelatex -progname=xelatex -etex
xelatex.ini' ...
This is XeTeXk, Version 3.141592-2.2-0.996 (Web2C 7.5.6) (INITEX)
 %&-line parsing enabled.

<skip...>
===========================================
Local configuration file hyphen.cfg used
===========================================
(/groups/tools/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/source/latex/cmcyralt/hyphen.cfg
Loading hyphenation patterns for US english.
(/groups/tools/texlive/2007/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen/hyphen.tex)
Loading hyphenation patterns for Russian.
(/groups/tools/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/doc/latex/cmcyralt/rhyphen.tex
! Nonletter.
l.108  .Â æ¯ .¡¥2§1á°
                           .¤¨2Â
?
! Emergency stop.
l.108  .Â æ¯ .¡¥2§1á°
                           .¤¨2Â
No pages of output.
----------------End Run-----------------
(The garbage chars here are garbage chars in my terminal, although it
appears that they're being interpreted as if they were Unicode chars.)

The file that causes failure, rhyphen.tex, is indeed non-Unicode:
----------------
> file /groups/tools/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/doc/latex/cmcyralt/rhyphen.tex
/groups/tools/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/doc/latex/cmcyralt/rhyphen.tex:
Non-ISO extended-ASCII English text
----------------
When I cat that file, I get tons of non-ASCII chars; no guess what its
encoding is.  It appears to be in the distribution, at least its timestamp
is about the same as most of the other files in the distribution.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure I remember editing the .hyp files to
convert them to UTF-8 the last time I installed xetex; without that, it
simply wouldn't run.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD