Mail Archives: cygwin/2005/05/19/20:32:16
On Thu, 19 May 2005, Mcdougall, Robert A. wrote:
> "m. z." <mzap80AThotmailDOTcom> wrote:
>
> BTAM, the wizards will not reply to such naive questions as
> yours or mine. FWIW, here's what I've found out:
>
> > Why doing "latex" is invoking now pdf format ?
>
> According to the teTeX manual ('doc/tetex/TETEXDOC.{dvi,pdf,ps}'),
> section 4.6, "pdfetex: the new default TEX engine":
>
> teTEX uses pdfetex for all formats except ``good-old'' tex.
> So, if you run latex, the underlying engine will be pdfetex.
>
> > In the mail below, I see that still with version 3.0.0-3, which
> > still I have not installed because I failed both with 3.0.0-1
> > and 3.0.0-2, when one is doing "latex filename.tex", in the line
> > below the output is "pdfeTeX..." With the previous version of
> > tetex (2.something) this was not happening. Is this the source
> > of the problems with tetex 3.0.0-x ?
>
> Perhaps not. Or if it is, it may not be an insuperable
> obstacle. My problems with teTeX 3 so far seem to relate to
> outdated configuration files; local configuration files left
> around from teTeX 2 are liable to break teTeX 3.
I'm a far cry from a TeXpert, but I believe you're correct. The engine
being pdfetexk shouldn't affect anything -- my new LaTeX still happily
produces .dvi files. But stale config files will cause it to fail.
> For example:
>
> * If you have an old customized 'web2c/texmf.cnf', even in the
> main TEXMF tree, the installer may not overwrite it, and the old
> file will break teTeX 3. This is because the path configuration
> rules have changed significantly from teTeX 2.
And because the postinstall script from tetex will not replace a changed
texmf.cnf (nor other config files). It does something rather
non-sensical, though, since it basically prints the diff to the setup log
file (while the comment states that the user will be shown the diff and
asked what to do). I wonder if it's time to have a tetex-config script,
similar to cron-config or ssh-host-config, that needs to be invoked before
tetex will run (on installations with custom config files, of course -- on
untouched installs tetex can still run OOTB).
> * Configuration files in local TEXMF trees may also break the new
> teTeX, perhaps for reasons related to the pdfetex thang (also
> new to teTeX 3). Anyhow, cleaning out the old config files got
> LaTeX working again for me; YMMV.
HTH,
Igor
--
http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
|\ _,,,---,,_ pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu
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