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

[Chris Travers]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> wrote:
> Am Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:59:16 -0700 schrieb Chris Travers:
>
>> This matches my needs very well.  If my clients are running accounting
>> systems, the last thing I want is an upgrade of TexLive to break their
>> ability to generate invoices.
>
> Normally you get more problems if you can't update ;-)

You get more problems with things suddenly and unexpectedly breaking
if you don't change them?  On what theory?

At least if you don't include deliberate breakage of programs over a
certain age......

>
>> If there are bugs in older versions, I can work around those bugs,
>> but the problem of getting a document that will only render with
>> one version or another is not acceptable to my application.
>
> Then you shouldn't rely on an external TeXLive installation. You
> have absolutly no control on the status of the TeXLive installations
> of your users. You don't know if the fedora user installed the
> fedora-TeXLive or the newest shapshot from the svn.
>
> You also have no control about the package versions installed by the
> users. fontspec e.g. can be an old version, the current version on
> CTAN or the unstable version from Github.

I think you may misunderstand how this works.

We have some (relatively basic) demo templates.  They are tested on
TeXLive 2007 and 2009 at present and known to render properly.  They
don't use a whole lot of packages (I think mostly longtable, geometry,
and a few others).  These are designed to give people a sense of what
they can do but not necessarily provide exactly what they need.

The client then can contract with me or others to write templates in
the environment of their choice.  That may be TeTeX (RHEL 5), TexLive
2007 (RHEL 6 and friends), TexLive (Debian Stable and friends), it
could be a shiney new TexLive.  It could be MikTeX.  It could be
whatever.  These documents are then tested on these environments and
verified to work reliably and predictably.

The software then plugs text into the templates and runs them.  These
then run reliably as long as nothing changes.

If someone is going to upgrade TexLive, the templates have to be
tested again, against the new version.  That usually means a staging
server is updated first, the templates tested, and then the update
rolled out to production when it is verified not to cause problems.
This is a very slow, deliberate process, as it should be.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers