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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>
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