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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