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From: HAN@FRECP12.BITNET (Jay Thierry HAN)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: initex with emTeX?
Message-ID: <91058.115628HAN@FRECP12.BITNET>
Date: 27 Feb 91 15:56:28 GMT
References: <62072@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Lines: 21
Organisation: ECP-Paris France

In article <62072@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>, xiaofei@acsu.buffalo.edu (Xiaofei
Wang) says:
>
>I checked the emTeX distribution disks that there is no initex going with
>it. If I use sb30tex's initex and its formats and so on, is there a
>problem in compatibility?

emTeX doesn't have a initex because the same executable (TEX.EXE or TEX286.EXE)
can do normal TeX compiling AND initex format generation (switch /i for INITEX)
Therefore, you can (and must! .. see below) re-create the formats using emTeX.
Usually, formats are NOT interchangeable from one executable to another. They
are highly implementation-dependent. You can't use formats generated by
SB30TEX with emTeX and vice-versa.
As far as I know (am I right?) formats are memory dumps. If two implementations
don't use the same memory organization and/or data structures, they generate
incompatible formats. This is even more so between SBTeX and emTeX, because
the former was written in Pascal (Turbo-Pascal I think) and the latter was
translated and optimized in C.

Hope this helps.
                                                     J.T.H.