ishamid wrote:

This has been a really frustrating week...

sorry for that i played a it with the $engine stuff in web2c and (as adam already found out for xetex) somehow that mechanism does not work well [one can set en engine in texmf.cnf, like TEXFORMATS = .;$TEXMF/web2c/{$engine,} MFBASES = .;$TEXFORMATS MPMEMS = .;$TEXFORMATS TEXPOOL = .;$TEXFORMATS MFPOOL = .;$TEXFORMATS MPPOOL = .;$TEXFORMATS but when generating format files that way, pool files are not found and such. at the moment the best way of dealing with is is to use texexec's engine handler; locate texexec.ini (or rme) and set set UseEnginePath to true after that pdfetex, aleph, xetex, mpost etc will end up on their own path. (in case of the minimal distribution, TEXFORMATS are set to an os specific texmf tree, say texmf-linux/web2c or texmf-mswin/web2c, so don't worry about the cnf file; currently texexec prepends the engine subpath so it should work this way but it's kind of a hack because in the future i'd like kpse to handle it - also, problems will be less when pool files move into the binary - there have been some discussions about that recently) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------