I've just freshly installed miktex 2.9 on windows 8. Plain tex seems to work but running latex on a simple file produces
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.4-1.40.13 (MiKTeX 2.9)
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
Searching for this error suggests that I should regenerate format files via miktex's options program, which I have done. Indeed I observe that miktex options->update formats touches the files latex.fmt
and pdflatex.fmt
(and others) in the following directory:
C:\Users\Jenny\AppData\Local\MiKTeX\2.9\miktex\data\le\pdftex
However the error still occurs. (I also tried miktex options->format->build, which seems to do the same thing but one file at a time).
I'm not sure how to verify that latex is looking in the right place for these files. In miktex options->roots I see the path C:\Users\Jenny\AppData\Local\MiKTeX\2.9
with description "UserInstall, UserConfig". However I can't see any environment variables pointing to this directory. Following this answer I tried defining
TEXMFCACHE=C:\Users\Jenny\AppData\Local\MiKTeX\2.9
to no avail. I also tried copying the .fmt files to both of these directories:
C:\Users\Jenny\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9\miktex\data\le\pdftex
C:\ProgramData\MiKTeX\2.9\miktex\data\le\pdftex
kpsewhich --engine=pdftex pdflatex.fmt
. Then go to miktex settings (user mode), tab format, select the pdflatex entry and click on build. Do you get an error? Does this recreate the fmt you found with kpsewhich? – Ulrike Fischer Jul 20 '14 at 10:12kpsewhich
points toC:/Users/Jenny/AppData/Local/MiKTeX/2.9/miktex/data/le/pdftex/pdflatex.fmt
which is recreated without error from the format tab. – stewbasic Jul 21 '14 at 0:01