[XeTeX] How to manually create the xelatex.fmt?

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I appear to have solved this by running xelatex -ini manually and then
> copying the ..fmt file to the appropriate directory.
>
> Thanks for everyone's help.
>
> As a note, I am really restricted to supporting TexLive versions that
> ship on stable long-term-support (and supported) distros....
>
> We can argue about whether these distros are too shy about upgrades,
> but users don't like to hear that their shiny rpm or .deb requires
> that they also track down large dependencies from external sources not
> in any repository for their distro.....

Users also don't like to discover that the publishers' LaTeX format they
need won't work with the distro TeX, or that a document that formats correctly
on a co-author's Mac or Windows system won't format on their linux system.
The TeX ecosystem needs some reasonable limits on how long old versions
should be supported.  If users can't get adequate support from their
distro there
are better supported alternatives.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia