[XeTeX] How to manually create the xelatex.fmt?

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 10:53 AM,  <mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca> wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Oct 2011, George N. White III wrote:
>> Users also don't like to discover that the publishers' LaTeX format they
>> need won't work with the distro TeX, or that a document that formats correctly
>> on a co-author's Mac or Windows system won't format on their linux system.
>
> That seems to me to be a reason to *continue* support for older versions,
> not a reason to *end* it.  I don't understand how you got from the above
> to the next thing you wrote:

No -- newer versions have to deal with changes to external interfaces
(fonts, image
formats, library versions, etc.) so end up adding extra code to check
for old versions and work around limitations, or do without some
desirable features that can't be implemented on the older version.  It
takes real work to support older versions and
the options to make improvements are constrained.   Compromises are needed to
live within the hardware limitations of baseline systems at the time
the design is
fixed.   This thinking would still have TeX configurations that could
run in 16-bit memory address limits.  Even if you think that would be
useful, the people who
do the heavy lifting tend to use current or even leading edge hardware
and are going to be more interested in the new capabilities they can
get by taking advantage of the latest hardware developments than
minimizing memory footprints.   Ultimately, the
decisions are made by the people who write the code.

>> The TeX ecosystem needs some reasonable limits on how long old versions
>> should be supported.  If users can't get adequate support from their
>
> --
> Matthew Skala
> mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
>
>
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-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia