[texhax] [tex-live] How to do the following?

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Wed Oct 4 23:12:22 CEST 2006


>>>>> "Philip" == Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> writes:

  > On my TeX-Live 2005 installation, TeX too invokes PdfeTeXK.

You can try to invoke tex on the commandline to find out how TeXLive is
configured.  I'm sure that on Windows it behaves like on UNIX.
Here I get:

     $ tex \\relax\\end
     This is TeXk, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.5)
      %&-line parsing enabled.
     No pages of output.
     Transcript written on texput.log.

  > Whether this is an artifact of TeX-Live or of WinEDT I do not know
  > : 

It is very likely that WinEDT does not use Knuth's tex because of
hyphen.tex.  Old versions of teTeX and TeXLive provided a hyphen.tex
which allowed to load other hyphenation patterns than those provided
by Knuth (USEnglish only).  There had been two reasons Thomas replaced
this file by Knuth's original file:  First, because a modified version
of TeX should not be called TeX, and secondly, because Knuth told him
that he maintains his tex master sources on a teTeX system.

For people who need hyphenation patterns for other languages than
USEnglish Thomas provides some hints in fmtutil.cfg.

For WinEDT it makes sense *not* to use Knuth's tex because people want
to use the hyphenation patterns they need.

  > as I said in my previous message, although the purist in me
  > rebels at such un-Knuth-like behaviour, I find it so convenient
  > that I have never thought to complain ...

Which purist?  LaTeX and plain TeX are two totally different things.
Whenever we talk about LaTeX I always miss the purist you mentioned.

You can probably write FORTRAN programs in any programming language,
but if you write FORTRAN-like code in C++ or Java you definitely can't
claim that you are a purist.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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