Re: texworks crashes with a context mkiv example

> On 15 Mar 2026, at 21:25, Jim Diamond <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> My TL 2026 installation is fine.  But I installed mine using the TL
> installer, as opposed to some distro's package manager.  If mtx-context.lua
> is missing, it sounds more like a distro thing than a TL thing.

I erased my MacTeX install and reinstalled via install-tl.

Same problem when running LuaTeX-based ConTeXt (aka mkiv), which I traced back to TEXMFVAR/luatex-cache/context/<random-number> containing no formats subdir.

Two ways to solve this:

- Run "context --luatex --make" prior to "context --luatex example.tex".

- Noticing that TeXShop's ConTeXt.engine calls context with an (undocumented?) --autogenerate option, gave me the idea to try "context --luatex --automake example.tex". This works too, the missing cont-en.fmt is generated on-the-fly.

I don't know whether that's normal, I'm pretty inexperienced with ConTeXt.

Other than that, back to the original problem reported by Luigi Scarso: the TeXworks crash seems SyncTeX-related, it happens when TeXworks tries to display the generated PDF file, only when this PDF file contains SyncTeX info (reported to the texworks list).

Hope this helps,

Bruno