[tex-live] Having a .fmt for different engines

[Jonathan Kew]

On 4 Jan 2007, at 4:56 pm, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> How do I make sure that .fmt files are put in a subdir of web2c by
> fmtutil? E.g.
>
> 	fmtutil --byfmt cont-en
>
> produces
>
> 	web2c/cont-en.fmt
>
> but what I want is
>
> 	web2c/pdftex/cont-en.fmt
> 	 web2c/xetex/cont-en.fmt
>
> so cont-en.fmt is available for both pdfTeX and XeTeX and not one
> balks at finding a format produced by the other.

AFAIK, this would require a change to fmtutil or to the organization  
of things at a higher level.

You could use the --fmtdir option to control where the format files  
are placed, but you'd still get all the formats from a given run of  
the tool in a single place. (In fact, because it builds them all in a  
working directory, and then installs them, I believe the later cont- 
en.fmt would simply overwrite the earlier, and you'd only end up with  
one of them.)

If the format specifications were split into separate files, you  
could run fmtutil with the --cnffile and --fmtdir options to build  
the formats for each engine separately. But this would mean  
maintaining (at least) two separate "parts" of fmtutil.cnf, and  
therefore changes to the way this is managed by tools like texconfig.

IMO, a preferable solution would be to give fmtutil a new option -- 
use-engine-subdirs or something like that, and have it place the  
formats into ${engine} subdirectories of the destination. It would  
also have to be changed to install them as they're built, rather than  
building them all in the working dir and then installing en masse.

Others probably understand all this much better than I do, though....

JK