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+<head>
+<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label initex</title>
+</head><body>
+<h3>What&#8217;s happened to <i>initex</i>?</h3>
+<p/>In the beginning, (La)TeX was stretching the capacity of every
+system it was ported to, so there was a premium on reducing the size
+of executables. One way of doing this was to have a separate
+executable, <i>initex</i>, that had things in it that aren&#8217;t
+needed in ordinary document runs &#8212; notably <code>\</code><code>patterns</code> (which
+builds hyphenation tables), and <code>\</code><code>dump</code> (which writes out a format).
+<p/>On modern systems, the size of this code is insignificant in
+comparison to the memory available, and maintaining separate programs
+has been found sufficiently error-prone that free Unix-style system
+distributions have abolished <i>initex</i> and its friends and
+relations such as <i>inipdftex</i> in favour of a single
+executable (that is, just <i>tex</i> or <i>pdftex</i>) that
+will &#8220;do what <i>initex</i> (or whatever) used to do&#8221; if it
+detects the command option &#8220;<code>-ini</code>&#8221;.
+<p/>The change happened with the advent of teTeX version
+3.0, which appeared at the beginning of 2005. At that time,
+TeX Live was following teTeX, so that year&#8217;s TeX Live
+distribution would also have dropped <i>initex</i>.
+<p/>It would appear that the equation is somewhat different for the
+MiKTeX developers, since that system continues to offer an
+<i>initex</i> executable.
+
+<p/><p/><p/><p/><p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=initex">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=initex</a>
+</body>