[XeTeX] public xelatex.fmt

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Jun 2008, at 4:30 pm, maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu wrote:

> 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' ...

Ok, this indicates that it didn't find xelatex.fmt already available  
in (one of) the web2c directory(ies) where it looks for these...

> 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

This doesn't look good; I don't think you want a hyphen.cfg file that  
was specifically intended for Cyrillic stuff in 8-bit LaTeX.

> 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

And sure enough, it tries to load old 8-bit patterns without going  
through the Unicode-conversion macros that were shipped in TL2007.

> ! 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.)

Yup.


My guess is that you have an old texmf.cnf file that doesn't give the  
correct TEXINPUTS paths for xetex and xelatex, and that's why it is  
looking in the /latex/ subdir and finding this hyphen.cfg file that  
is messing things up for you.

In fact, on looking at those paths again, I see that the hyphen.cfg  
file is under the /source/ tree, which shouldn't be in the runtime  
search path; and the rhyphen.tex file is under /doc/, ditto! Check  
your TEXINPUTS settings in texmf.cnf -- or do you have an environment  
variable that's overriding it?

JK