[XeTeX] Babel

Herbert Schulz herbs at wideopenwest.com
Fri May 4 22:07:58 CEST 2012


On May 4, 2012, at 2:44 PM, Zdenek Wagner wrote:

> 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at yahoo.com>:
>>> 
>>> Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
>>> want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
>>> because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
>>> have no reason to patch it.
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
>> of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
>> of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled
>> binaries I see the following:
>> 
>> apostolo at nadya>> ./tex
>> This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
>> **^D
>> ! End of file on the terminal... why?
>> apostolo at nadya>> ./pdftex
>> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
>>  restricted \write18 enabled.
>> **^C
>> 
>> 
>> The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
>> do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
>> get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files.
>> 
> This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works,
> you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave
> as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly
> with what you asked for.

Howdy,

As a matter of fact calling tex DOES give the original tex program which, to DK's wishes, is totally frozen; it is NOT a link to pdftex (pdfetex is a link to pdftex!). On the other hand latex is a link to pdftex (which runs in dvi mode using the latex2e format file). Because tex is frozen it also hasn't inherited things like ``restricted \write18'' or synctex that have been added to pdftex (and pdfetex and latex).

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)






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