On May 4, 2012, at 2:44 PM, Zdenek Wagner wrote: > 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropou...@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@nadya>> ./tex >> This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev) >> **^D >> ! End of file on the terminal... why? >> apostolo@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) -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex