Re: flavours of LaTeX
On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 11:12 +0100, Sjoerd Hardeman wrote:
> Stefan Schwarzer wrote:
> >> I've two Debian boxes. One one (sarge) it appears that `latex` is really
> >> `e-TeX` whereas on the other (unstable) it appears that `latex` is
> >> really `pdfeTex`. It must have been like this for a while and I've not
> >
> >> appears that 'e_TeX' will read in .eps files but 'pdfeTex' won't..
> >
> >> tell me if it's brief!) about (a) how these happen to have been set up
> >> differently, (b) how to change one so that both are the same.
> >
> > In my case (more or less etch, tetex 3.0-21), latex points to pdfetex as well.
> > As I understand, the mechanism is more or less the following. There is
> > a generic 'tex' program which will load different 'formats' or 'flavors' of
> > tex (latex, pdftex, plain tex, ...), basically corresponding to some set of
> > compiled macros which with the help of the generic 'tex' program are able
> > to produce device independent intermediate
> > output - dvi in the old days, dvi or pdf nowadays. The 'format' is derived
> > from the name that the generic 'tex' program has been invoked with.
> > The generic 'tex' program seems to be called pdfetex nowadays.
> >
> > When 'latex'ing a file, the latex-format loads additional
> > style/class/macro definition files according to
> > rules laid out in (/etc/texmf/)texmf.cnf. The tetex-suite depends on
> > the kpse... commands to interprete this file. kpsewhich can be used to
> > check whether and where a particular style/class file will be found or not.
> >
> > .eps input is processed by one of the style files, typically graphicx.sty
> > or epsfig.sty for figures. Knowledge about .eps input is transfered to the
> > device independent file using a \special macro. The dvi-output of
> > that macro is left for interpretation to the programs that actually produce
> > output or that convert into printable formats (dvips, xdvi, ...). When
> > invoking pdflatex, .eps input may not appear in the pdf-output file (at least
> > this was the situation about 2 years ago). For these 'tex flavors' it
> > was necessary to provide the pictures themselves in pdf format.
> >
> > I'll stop babbling now - hope that helps in diagnosing the situation
> >
> >
> That's right, use eps pictures for dvi and ps output. If you plan to run
> pdftex to produce a pdf file, your picture has to be a gif, jpeg, png,
> pdf or metapost picture.
> latex always produces dvi. If you include the graphicx package, tell it
> to use a driver (dvips for postsript, pdftex for pdf) and the image
> inclusion will do what it has to do. On the web you can find macros that
> automatically execute the right code. See
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/ifpdf.html and
> the graphicx package documentation for more info.
> Success!
>
> Sjoerd
>
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
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