Dear Hans and all, again, thanks for your help! Everything is working as it should now. After asking on the TeX on OSX mailing-list, I found out that there was an experimental installation that already contains pdftex 1.20a, so I upgraded. I changed texmf.cnf as you suggested to Christopher Creutzig yesterday, regenerated mapfiles, and everything's bright again. But I was sweating and cursing... If it hadn't been for a complete backup of my old TeX installation on my second hard drive and your wonderful help, I would have had a lot of serious troubles. I guess that's a general problem with TeX installations: originally, they were made for UNIX mainframes maintained by knowledgeable sys admins who would likely know how to cope with such a situation. Nowadays, I assume that the majority of TeX users sit in front of their own box, and even though I can do some things on the command line and have by now acquired a reasonabel amount of TeXpertise, I would have been absolutely helpless without you and Gerben's great installer. So you're absolutely right: downward compatibility is broken; it is difficult to make local changes without wiping the entire installation. That's what you get from being impatient... All best, and thanks Thomas On Oct 11, 2004, at 10:03 PM, Hans Hagen wrote:

i'll try to keep texmfstart as compatibile as possible; there has been a change in tds with regards to scripts (interestingly context was the first to come with such scripts and the rule was to use /context/...); when more package came with scripts tds was changed and now it's /scripts/... ; the problem is that there is no strong urge to be downward compatible (i tried to convince them in change but in vain) and since kpsewhich now uses another --format directive for such scripts, downward compatibility in my opinion is broken (all scripts that somehow use kpse to determine what to run will fail from now on, unless changed); so, this is why i cooked up texmfstart: it tries to be clever in determining what to call. (You cannot imagine how much of my local and project trees and scripts i had to adapt; a lot of wasted time)