Re: Unknown format name/engine: latex/TeX, or latex.fmt not found

On Sunday, February 3, 2013 12:39 PM, Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> Am Sun, 3 Feb 2013 06:06:37 -0800 (PST) schrieb John Brown:
> 
>>  I agree that it is an error in MiKTeX, but does this mean that I
>>  should have sat on my hands and waited for MiKTeX to fix itself?
> 
> Well simply waiting would not have solved the problem as miktex will
> not fix itself if nobody makes a bug report. 
> 
> But on the other side: running unknown scripts

I never ran any unknown scripts. I extracted the source for jadetex
that was included with miktex. When I ran `make' in that directory,
it was with the sole intent of producing the missing .ltx file and
the Makefile worked, as it was designed to do by its author.

`Make install' failed for a reason that I do not remember; it may
have been permissions, as I very likely was not in an Administrator
command prompt, or perhaps yet another missing file.

> and clicking on all
> sort of buttons without real idea what's going on isn't the correct
> strategie either. 

Do I know which commands are executed when I click "Build" in the
GUI? No. Do I even know the purpose of a format file? No. But I know
that if I select format "ABC" and then click "Build", then miktex
will build ABC.fmt, which is what I wanted, and it worked.

By taking obvious, common-sense actions, I was able to generate
all the missing files. The problem was that miktex did not know
how to find them. There was no obvious, common-sense solution,
(other than reading the manual) so I stopped working and sent
a message to the mailing list, and you provided the solution of
tex/generic/jadtex under a new root, and I thank you very much
for it.

> 
> To quote Simon Tatham
> (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html):
> 
...
> 
> Instead of being a mongoose, be an antelope. When an antelope is
> confronted with something unexpected or frightening ...
> it stops and thinks and works out the best thing to do. (If
> antelopes had a technical support line, it would be telephoning it
> at this point.)

As far as I am concerned, this is exactly what I did. The system
said that certain files were missing. I did not see anywhere
to download them, so I built them using the tools provided by
miktex for that purpose.

Regards,
John Brown.

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