Running IniTEX

When setting up a new format one has to start IniTEX with lplain.tex as the input file. After displaying some progress report on the terminal, lplain.tex will try to \input the files hyphen.tex and lfonts.tex.

As we said above, it seems a good idea to rename these files because, when TEX complains that it cannot find them and asks you to type in another file name, you get the chance to substitute your favourite hyphenation patterns without changing lplain.tex or copying something to hyphen.tex. The transcript file will show the name of the file used which is very useful to debug weird errors (later).

When the point is reached where TEX wants to read in lfonts.tex, you now have to specify `lfonts.new'. This file will \input some other files. After processing them (which will take some time), IniTEX stops once more since it cannot find the file xxxlfont.sty. This is intentional; in this way you may now specify the desired default by entering one of the following file names:

oldlfont.sty

If you choose this file, your format will be identical to the standard L^ATEX version 2.09 except that a few additional commands (like \normalshape) are available. Of course, documents or style options which explicitly refer to things like \tentt will produce error messages since such internal commands are no longer defined.¹³ Nevertheless it is easy to fix the problem in such a case: if we know that \tentt referred to cmtt10, i.e. Computer modern typewriter normal at 10pt, we can define it as

 \newcommand{\tentt}{\family{cmtt}
     \series{m}\shape{n}\size{10}{12pt}
     \selectfont}

Since we assume the `oldlfont' option as default, where \tt resets series and shape, the definition could be shortened to

\newcommand{\tentt}{\size{10}{12pt}\tt}

To get the new way of font selection as described in the previous sections (e.g. where \tt simply means to switch to another family) you only have to add the `newlfont' style option to the \documentstyle command in your document.

newlfont.sty

This is just the counterpart to oldlfont.sty: it will make the new mechanism the default and you have to add `oldlfont' as a style option if you want to process older documents which depend on the old mechanism.

basefnt.tex

This file is similar to newlfont.sty but does not define the L^ATEX symbol fonts. These fonts contain only a few characters which are also included in the AMS symbol fonts. Therefore we provided the possibility of generating a format which doesn't unnecessarily occupy one of the (only) sixteen math groups within one math version. Using this file you can easily switch to the old scheme (adding `oldlfont' as an option), to the new scheme with L<sup>A</sup>TEX symbol fonts (using `newlfont') or to the new scheme with additional AMS fonts by using either the style option `amsfonts' (fonts only) or the style option `amstex' (defining the whole set of macros in a L^ATEX like syntax).

Anyway, after reading the file chosen, TEX will continue by processing latex.tex and finally displaying the message ``Input any local modifications here''. If you don't dare to do so, use \dump to finish the run. This will leave you with a new .fmt file (to be put into TEX's format area) and the corresponding transcript file. It isn't a very good idea to delete this one because you might need it later to find out what you did when you dumped the format!