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

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/10/19 Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>
I have documents as old as 18 years that still render almost without
problems. The problem is that they rely on proprietary fonts and emTeX
in OS/2 required them in a different directory than TL in TeX Live. It
even does not matter that the documents are prepared in CP852 and now
my locale is UTF-8, I can still work in CP852. It's because the
documents rely on my own macros and packages that are backward
compatible.

> Best Wishes,
> Chris Travers
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz