Re: flavours of LaTeX

[michael <linux@networkingnewsletter.org.uk>]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 19:03 +0100, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 12:44:02 -0500, Kevin Mark wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 05:15:48PM +0000, michael wrote:
> > > 
> > > All useful info but my main Q was how come one installation uses etex
> > > and the other pdftex. And how best to 'standardize'? There may have been
> > > a question during installation about pdflatex but I'm not sure if I
> > > remember correctly. If so I guess I can remove --purge and re-install
> > > but I was presuming there was another/better way?
> > > 
> > > Thanks, M
> > Hi M, 
> > I have been not really following the total discussion, but I have an
> > observation: sometimes there are programs that can be called more than
> > one way and that the way they are called affect how they works.
> > E.g. grep is a program and egrep is a shell script that calls grep with
> > specific options.
> > 
> > Maybe $TEX_PROGRAM_1 and $TEX_PROGRAM_2 are just calling
> > $ACTUAL_TEX_PROGRAM with different options?
> > 
> > as for reconfiguring a package:
> > dpkg-reconfigure -plow $PKGNAME
> > will reconfigure a package with the most questions asked
> > dpkg-reconfigure -phigh $PKGNAME
> > will reconfigure a package with the least questions asked
> 
> LaTeX and friends have now all been incorporated into pdfetex; only bare
> TeX is still a separate executable:
> 
> $ ls -l `which {,la,ams,e,jade,pdf{,e,la,jade}}tex`
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 2006-10-20 10:13 /usr/bin/amstex -> pdfetex
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 2006-10-20 10:13 /usr/bin/etex -> pdfetex
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      4 2006-10-18 10:05 /usr/bin/jadetex -> etex
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 2006-10-20 10:13 /usr/bin/latex -> pdfetex
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 475824 2006-10-19 15:42 /usr/bin/pdfetex
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 2006-10-18 10:05 /usr/bin/pdfjadetex -> pdfetex
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 2006-10-20 10:13 /usr/bin/pdflatex -> pdfetex
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      7 2006-10-20 10:13 /usr/bin/pdftex -> pdfetex
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 245308 2006-10-19 15:42 /usr/bin/tex
> 
> pdfetex, however, behaves differently depending on which name was used
> to invoke it, e.g. it produces a dvi if you call latex, a pdf if you
> call pdflatex, etc.
> 

It was more that even running 'latex' the graphicsx won't accept eps
files (whereas the older 'latex' (linked to etex on that box) does).
Ta,M