Lesssons Learnt from Fixing broken Xetex on Arch Linux
I build and maintain a bunch of documents in Latex, though I'm not an expert in Latex, I still found it easier to maintain than keeping a Word document around -- whenever I want to modify things, I would open Tex Studio, modify and then rebuild. The generated PDF is symlink to my desktop for easy access when I need to attach it. This works well till last Friday. I modify things, and the generated PDF did not reflect any of the changes I made. What could be the problem?
Locate the problem
Well, it wasn't really easy to diagnose the issue from the Tex Studio interface -- every time I rebuilt, it looks as if it was generating new docs but it wasn't actually doing that (cause the speed was simply too fast). So, the solution was to use CLI -- I got the actual command from settings in Tex Studio.
I first ran: xelatex -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -output-directory=build "document".tex
What I got was:
/var/lib/texmf/web2c/xetex/xelatex.fmt made by different executable version, strings are different
Well, to be honest, this error message wasn't helpful at all. It still wasn't clear what the issue was. But it's still worth looking it up.