[XeTeX] Babel

[Herbert Schulz]

On May 4, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:

>> 
>> Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
>> want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
>> because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
>> have no reason to patch it.
>> 
> 
> 
> No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
> of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
> of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled
> binaries I see the following:
> 
> apostolo at nadya>> ./tex
> This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
> **^D
> ! End of file on the terminal... why?
> apostolo at nadya>> ./pdftex
> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
>  restricted \write18 enabled.
> **^C
> 
> 
> The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
> do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
> get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. 
> 


Howdy,

I hesitate jumping into this discussion but one reason to retain tex->dvi->ps->pdf is that pdftex can't include eps figures by default. That said, recent versions of pdftex using the graphicx package can use epstopdf (which uses Ghostscript?) to convert eps->pdf on the fly unless you have your system set to ``paranoid'' mode.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)