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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label initex</title>
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<h3>What’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’t
needed in ordinary document runs — 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 “do what <i>initex</i> (or whatever) used to do” if it
detects the command option “<code>-ini</code>”.
<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’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>
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