[XeTeX] XeTeX, TeX Live 2005, Mac OS X 10.4.x

[Jonathan Kew]

Hi Joanna,

Sorry to be slow in replying - I'm out of the office this week (in  
Africa), with only very occasional access to email.

> Hello,
>
> is there any progress in XeTeX for TeX Live under Mac OS X since May?
>
> I had to reinstall my os recently and to install TeX Live once  
> more. Without XeTeX. I downloaded a dmg-file and run the installer,  
> but it's, as far as I know, for teTeX, not for TeX Live. And when I  
> type:
>
> $ xetex
> ...
> ** \end
>
> I get an error:
>
> kpathsea: Running mktexfmt xetex.fmt
> fmtutil: running `xetex -ini   -jobname=xetex -progname=xetex  
> *xetex.ini' ...
> ! I can't read xetex.pool; bad path?
> Error: `xetex -ini  -jobname=xetex -progname=xetex *xetex.ini' failed

The plan is for XeTeX to be included in TL2006, fully integrated with  
the rest of the installation, but of course this doesn't help you  
right now as TL2006 is not yet available. And the current installer  
doesn't set up everything properly on a TL2005 installation. :(

Here are the main things to look for, I think:

1) Check that the actual xetex binaries (xetex, xdv2pdf, xdvipdfmx)  
are installed in the same /bin/... directory as the rest of the TL  
programs, so that the same configuration files and texmf trees will  
be found.

2) Check that xetex.pool is located in a texmf/web2c directory that  
will be searched (run texhash if necessary), and that the other xetex  
input files (xetex.ini, unicode-letters.tex, etc) are in a texmf/tex  
tree that will be searched at run time.

3) The xetex-related paths in texmf.cnf are probably not good; they  
should be something like
   TEXINPUTS.xelatex = .;$TEXMF/tex/{xelatex,latex,generic,}//
   TEXINPUTS.xetex   = .;$TEXMF/tex/{xetex,plain,generic,}//

4) You may need to disable a few languages in language.dat (e.g,  
Hungarian, Serbian, ??), especially if texmf.cnf puts TEXMFLOCAL at  
the end of the texmf trees that are searched (because the xetex  
installer has probably placed its modified versions of hyphenation  
files in the local tree). Otherwise you'll get errors when trying to  
build the xelatex format.

I will try to come up with a more detailed set of notes when I get  
home, if you can't solve it before then.

JK