pdfjadetex does not work! (was .pdf generation error using the"newer" tools)

["Alan W. Irwin" <irwin at beluga dot phys dot uvic dot ca>]

Three pdfjadetex questions/comments, then details of my system.

(1) Has anybody gotten the pdfjadetex command to work with the latest Cygnus docbook?

My 100+ pages of documentation definitely don't work, but to reproduce the
bug in an easy way I use the hello world file from
http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/docbook-intro/get-going.html#HELLO-WORLD
with the first 2 lines replaced by

<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1//EN" [
]>

I created hello_world.tex using

jade -c /etc/sgml/catalog \
-d  /usr/share/sgml/docbook/dsssl-stylesheets-1.57/print/docbook.dsl \
-t tex /usr/share/sgml/xml.dcl hello_world.xml

To check hello_world.tex is a good file I executed

jadetex hello_world.tex

The dvi file could be displayed with xdvi without problems.

******However, I cannot create a pdf version of this document**********

pdfjadetex hello_world.tex 
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-13d (Web2C 7.3.1)
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

Note this command works fine on my Debian box with this simple example and
also my 100+ pages of documentation.

(2) Has anybody been able to recreate pdfjadetex.fmt (and jadetex.fmt) with
more resources on a Cygnus-RedHat 6.2 system?  Files are missing in the
jadetex rpm, but even when I replace those files, I cannot recreate
pdfjadetex.fmt or jadetex.fmt.  This is unlikely to be a tetex problem
because I can recreate all *.fmt files *except pdfjadetex.fmt and
jadetex.fmt*.

It has been suggested previously on this list that the "I'm stymied" problem
might be due to lack of resources.  I successfully create extra resources
for pdfjadetex.fmt and jadetex.fmt on my Debian box with the appropriate
pdfjadetex.ini and jadetex.ini files and the appropriate special
configuration file for fmtutil configuration file.  (These are the files
that are missing from the Cygnus jadetex.rpm file).  However, even when I
copy the missing files from my Debian box to the Cygnus RedHat 6.2 box, the
fmtutil command does nothing when the special configuration file is
specified.  The procedure returns after a second or two with no error
messages or any other kind of output.  OTOH, if I execute fmtutil --all
(i.e., using the standard configuration file) on the Cygnus box, all *.fmt
files are recreated with parameters specified in texmf.cnf except for
pdfjadetex.fmt and jadetex.fmt which remain completely unchanged with
the old dates.

(3) I am beginning to feel the pdfjadetex problem might be more fundamental
than lack of resources since hello_world takes up so few resources, and any
attempt to reformat pdfjadetex (and jadetex) with more resources also fails.
So I would be most interested whether anybody can get either (1) or (2) to
work.

****System Details****

(1) Redhat 6.2 box completely updated with latest bug, security, etc., fixes from
the Redhat site.

(2) Vanilla RedHat 6.2 Docbook stripped out.  Here is the list of package files
whose equivalent package was removed.
docbook-3.1-3.noarch.rpm
jade-1.2.1-9.i386.rpm
jadetex-2.7-2.i386.rpm
sgml-common-0.1-7.noarch.rpm
sgml-tools-1.0.9-5.i386.rpm
stylesheets-0.13rh-4.noarch.rpm

(3) Latest Cygnus DocBook installed.

docbook-dtd31-sgml-1.0-6.noarch.rpm
docbook-dtd41-sgml-1.0-6.noarch.rpm
docbook-dtd41-xml-1.0-2.noarch.rpm
docbook-style-dsssl-1.57-2.noarch.rpm
docbook-utils-0.6-1.noarch.rpm
jade-1.2.1-6.i386.rpm
jadetex-2.20-4.noarch.rpm
perl-SGMLSpm-1.03ii-3.noarch.rpm
sgml-common-0.4-1.noarch.rpm

******Background:

I am part of the documentation team for the plplot project
(http://www.plplot.org.), and we successfully build our 100+ pages of
documentation using the Debian DocBook tools.  But those in the group
without access to Debian need to build the documentation on RedHat 6.2, and
I would like to recommend the Cygnus solution to them for this purpose.  So
far it works fairly well except for this pdf generation problem, and I hope
somebody can help to get that straightened out.

Thanks in advance,

Alan

email: irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6 
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