e-TeX is the first concrete result of an international research & development project, the NTS Project, which was established under the aegis of DANTE e.V. during 1992. The aims of the project are to perpetuate and develop the spirit and philosophy of TeX, whilst respecting Knuth's wish that TeX should remain frozen.

e-TeX can be used in two different modes: in compatibility mode it is supposed to be completely interchangable with standard TeX. In extended mode several new primitives are added that facilitate (among other things) bidirectional typesetting.

An extended mode format is generated by prefixing the name of the source file for the format with an asterisk (*). Such formats are often prefixed with an `e', hence etex as the extended version of tex and elatex as the extended version of latex. However, eplain is an exception to this rule.

The einitex and evirtex commands are e-TeX's analogues to the initex and virtex commands. In this installation, they are symlinks to the etex executable.

e-TeX's handling of its command-line arguments is similar to that of TeX.

--efmt format

Use format as the name of the format to be used, instead of the name by which e-TeX was called or a %& line.

--file-line-error-style

Print error messages in the form file:line:error which is similar to the way many compilers format them.

--help

Print help message and exit.

--ini

Be einitex, for dumping formats; this is implicitly true if the program is called as einitex.

--interaction mode

Sets the interaction mode. The mode can be one of batchmode, nonstopmode, scrollmode, and errorstopmode. The meaning of these modes is the same as that of the corresponding \commands.

--ipc

Send DVI output to a socket as well as the usual output file. Whether this option is available is the choice of the installer.

--ipc-start

As --ipc, and starts the server at the other end as well. Whether this option is available is the choice of the installer.

--jobname name

Use name for the job name, instead of deriving it from the name of the input file.

--kpathsea-debug bitmask

Sets path searching debugging flags according to the bitmask. See the Kpathsea manual for details.

--maketex fmt

Enable mktexfmt, where fmt must be one of tex or tfm.

--mltex

Enable MLTeX extensions.

--no-maketex fmt

Disable mktexfmt, where fmt must be one of tex or tfm.

--output-comment string

Use string for the DVI file comment instead of the date.

--parse-first-line

If the first line of the main input file begins with %& parse it to look for a dump name or a --translate-file option.

--progname name

Pretend to be program name. This affects both the format used and the search paths.

--recorder

Enable the filename recorder. This leaves a trace of the files opened for input and output in a file with extension .fls.

--shell-escape

Enable the \write18{command} construct. The command can be any Bourne shell command. This construct is normally disallowed for security reasons.

--translate-file tcxname

Use the tcxname translation table.

--version

Print version information and exit.

One caveat: In most e-TeX formats, you cannot use ~ in a filename you give directly to e-TeX, because ~ is an active character, and hence is expanded, not taken as part of the filename. Other programs, such as Metafont, do not have this problem.

TEXMFOUTPUT

Normally, e-TeX puts its output files in the current directory. If any output file cannot be opened there, it tries to open it in the directory specified in the environment variable TEXMFOUTPUT. There is no default value for that variable. For example, if you say tex paper and the current directory is not writable, if TEXMFOUTPUT has the value /tmp, e-TeX attempts to create /tmp/paper.log (and /tmp/paper.dvi, if any output is produced.)

TEXINPUTS

Search path for \input and \openin files. This should probably start with ``.'', so that user files are found before system files. An empty path component will be replaced with the paths defined in the texmf.cnf file. For example, set TEXINPUTS to ".:/home/usr/tex:" to prepend the current direcory and ``/home/user/tex'' to the standard search path.

TEXFONTS

Search path for font metric (.tfm) files.

TEXFORMATS

Search path for format files.

TEXPOOL

search path for einitex internal strings.

TEXEDIT

Command template for switching to editor. The default, usually vi, is set when e-TeX is compiled.

etex.pool

Encoded text of e-TeX's messages.

texfonts.map

Filename mapping definitions.

*.tfm

Metric files for e-TeX's fonts.

*.efmt

Predigested e-TeX format (.efmt) files.

This version of e-TeX fails to trap arithmetic overflow when dimensions are added or subtracted. Cases where this occurs are rare, but when it does the generated DVI file will be invalid.