[tex-live] installing a test image and running tex

[Jonathan Kew]

On 29 Dec 2006, at 4:37 pm, Claus Gerhardt wrote:

> Installing a test image (using a non-interactive install command) and
> running tex went smoothly on a PowerPC G5 with pdflatex, latex,
> context, bibtex, metapost, makeindex, xelatex. However, I noticed
> that xelatex couldn't be called from pdftex with parse first line
>
> %&xelatex
>
> instead I had to use a specific shell script calling xelatex. It
> would be nice, if xelatex and xetex could be called by parse first  
> line.


The parse-first-line functionality enables you to specify a different  
**format file** than the default that the engine would otherwise use.  
It does not support switching to a different program and starting  
over. XeTeX is an entirely separate program from pdftex. Expecting  
pdftex to handle %&xelatex would be like asking it to load a Metafont  
"base" file instead of one of its own formats.

(I suppose it could be modified to do an exec() instead of merely  
loading a new format, but that's not what the feature is currently  
designed for.)

JK