[tex-live] Triggering mktextex

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Tue Mar 16 22:35:26 CET 2010


    \openin does not respect the feature.
    It can be on purpose, because it is used in \IfFileExists.

Right.

    But it is not a clean way, because \openin could expect
    real data files that should be generated by mktextex or
    \pdffile(size,moddate) are used for existence tests,
    especially for graphics files (\pdfximage supports space
    in file names).

I have no theoretical counter-argument.

The practical problem is that it is expensive and ugly/verbose to call
mktextex on every (failing) \openin.  I venture to say, the result would
be unusably slow.  I didn't try it today, though.

I suppose enabling it for \openin could be a separate option from
enabling it for everything else.  That is, if there is any actual
practical need for it, which I doubt, since mktextex has been disabled
ever since I originally invented it.  I don't recall ever seeing a
request for it.


As for this hypothetical world where we try to auto-download packages a
la MiKTeX (which I don't foresee ever actually happening), I certainly
wouldn't advocate doing so on \openin.

k



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