Re: Bug#338608: Documenting change to tetex 3.0; deprecating initex and virtex.
On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 11:05:41PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> Two questions remain:
>
> 1. Is there a documentation stating the differences of the tetex
> implementation from the TeX as documented in TeXBook ?
> That could be useful
Plain TeX (as executed by the command "tex") on a default setup is
essentially identical to the TeX as documented in The TeXbook, except
for the features which can be enabled by command line switches (which
don't exist in The TeXbook).
pdfetex, which is the engine behind all the other versions of TeX
(latex, etex, pdflatex etc.) has more features.
> 2. Is 'virtex' equal to 'tex &plain ' ?
No: virtex should be tex with no format preloaded, but without the
extra primitives of initex (\dump, \patterns, any others?). It
probably needs a format to be loaded before it can do very much at
all. In sarge, virtex was effectively a synonym for plain TeX.
Julian
Reply to: