David Arnold wrote:

All,

In GWTeX, I could turn on write18 here:

% Enable \write18 (run shell processes from within TeX job) % Set to t if needed % (I think this might have security implications, especially if you % run tex jobs as administrator, so I keep it turned off by default shell_escape = f

But, because of security, I am wondering if I can leave this as is and use texexec to enable write18 at runtime.

Is there a switch for this?

I know you can do it with pdflatex with:

pdflatex --shell-escape

the latest version of pdftex can determine if write18 is enables so we can indeed make context/texexec a bit more clever; however, i'm always a bit carefull with such things because i want to make sure that users run recent binaries Hans