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I am trying to build pdflatex as part of TeX Live from source. Due to a variety of reasons that are not important, I need to build all these tools from scratch.

I have been able to build TeX Live from scratch using its source from this github repo: https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source. I loosely followed the build instructions from TeX Live's site here: https://tug.org/texlive/doc/tlbuild.html which for the most part mean running these commands in the checked out repo.

# Inside the repo
mkdir OUTPUT
./configure --prefix=$(pwd)/OUTPUT --enable-build-in-source-tree
make -j8
make install

From which I can see most of the correct binaries like pdftex and latexmk inside the directory

OUTPUT/bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

My next goal is to build pdflatex (which I learned does not function exactly like pdftex as mentioned here: What's the difference between pdfTeX and pdfLaTeX?). I am not really sure how to proceed from here though. I believe my next step is to somehow install the pdflatex format because it can be passed to the pdftex binary as a format flag like

pdftex -fmt=pdflatex

but I have also seen some other folks saying that pdflatex should come installed with TeX Live.

Does anyone by chance have experience or knowledge in this area?

nick2225
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    pdflatex is simply a symbolic link to pdftex the texlive tool fmtutil-sys will build the right format – David Carlisle Oct 24 '23 at 00:38
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    the texlive-source repo only has the sources for the compiled binaries. To build a format or process documents you need to get all the fonts and tex sources eg from a full texlive repository – David Carlisle Oct 24 '23 at 00:41
  • @DavidCarlisle So is the best approach to download a TeXLive repository as outlined here: https://tug.org/texlive/acquire-mirror.html – nick2225 Oct 24 '23 at 00:45
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    that would work (it would also give you ready made binaries but you could discard them and use your own) (which is what I do if I need to test self-compiled binaries) – David Carlisle Oct 24 '23 at 00:47
  • @DavidCarlisle on another note, would it be possible and/or easier to simply download the fonts and TeX sources from a TeXLive repo? Rather than downloading the whole repo iteself? – nick2225 Oct 24 '23 at 00:52
  • @nick2225 Well it's SVN so you could just check out the relevant directories – Joseph Wright Oct 24 '23 at 05:34
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    yes sorry that's what I meant. it's easiest to just do an end user install of texlive, then copy your binaries in to its bin directory for the platform – David Carlisle Oct 24 '23 at 07:00

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