[OS X TeX] Building new formats (MacTeX)

[Rowland McDonnell]

So I've got a TeX installation that I can use to pdfLaTeX documents.

But I'm still using the supplied formats, which have a lot of built-in
hyphenation patterns but not the one I need (UK English).

I was thinking about modifying the Babel setup so that I could have the
existing languages plus the one I need, with the one I need set up as
the default.

I see that to do this, I need to edit the appropriate language.dat file.

I'm told that I should use kpsewhich to find out which language.dat file
is the one that'll be used by iniTeX when I build my new formats.  To do
that, I need to find out which --format option to pass to kpsewhich so
that it'll look in only the places that iniTeX is going to search, but I
can't find anything at all to help me figure that one out.  

I've no idea where to start looking - can anyone help me find out how to
invoke kpsewhich for this job?

(the kpathsea documentation didn't help, and the TeXShop documentation,
which does explain a little about building new formats, didn't help
either.  I can't find any MacTeX documentation at all to speak of.  The
Babel documentation doesn't help.  The kpsewhich manpage doesn't help.
A few other things don't help either - point being, I've read quite a
lot of docs and drawn a blank)

Cheers,
Rowland.
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