querying the version of external tools/drivers

Ulrike Fischer news3 at nililand.de
Fri Sep 4 14:00:53 CEST 2020


My current use case is dvipdfmx, but this is also meant as more
general request.

dvipdfmx is currently extending the color support by adding new
specials or extending the syntax of existing specials and this is
very nice. But as the version of dvipdfmx is not known by latex it
is not so easy to exploit the new features while staying compatible
with older binaries (either by providing fall back code or at least
issue warnings). 

Would it be possible to provide the version info somehow? For
example could the output of dvipdfmx --version and of similar
tools/drivers be stored automatically somewhere in texmf-var in the
search path of tex? (Calling dvipdfmx --version during the
compilation doesn't work with shell-restricted.)

(I know this is not fool proof, people could move the dvi to another
computer and compile there.)



-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/



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