Installation

[Alvaro]

I am new to beamer. I have unsuccessfully been trying to compile the example in conference-ornate-20min.en. When I do it, I get the following message:

MiKTeX Problem Report

Message: Invalid argument

Data:

Source: Libraries\MiKTeX\Core\Stream\FileStream.cpp

Line: 76

MiKTeX: 2.9

OS: Windows 10 Home, 64-bit, build 10586

Invokers: non-existing/explorer/TeXnicCenter

SystemAdmin: no

PowerUser: no

Root0: C:\Users\alvar_000\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9

Root1: C:\Users\alvar_000\AppData\Local\MiKTeX\2.9

Root2: C:\ProgramData\MiKTeX\2.9

Root3: C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9

UserInstall: C:\Users\alvar_000\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9

UserConfig: C:\Users\alvar_000\AppData\Roaming\MiKTeX\2.9

UserData: C:\Users\alvar_000\AppData\Local\MiKTeX\2.9

CommonInstall: C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9

CommonConfig: C:\ProgramData\MiKTeX\2.9

CommonData: C:\ProgramData\MiKTeX\2.9

I have no idea of how to continue from here. I will appreciate any help.

Thanks,

Alvaro

[Mark Yagnatinsky]

This sounds like a miktex issue.  Try asking on the miktex list.  Or maybe at tex.stackexchange.com

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[Jan Bredereke]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016, Alvaro wrote:
> I am new to beamer. I have unsuccessfully been trying to compile the
> example in conference-ornate-20min.en. When I do it, I get the following
> message:
>

> [...]

>
> I have no idea of how to continue from here. I will appreciate any help.

As usual, try divide and conquer:

Does the the most simple LaTeX code compile? If no, then it is a MikTeX
installation problem.

Does the most simple Beamer-LaTeX code compile? If no, then it is a Beamer
installation problem.

Does a radically cut-down version of conference-ornate-20min.en compile?

And so on.

Regards,
Jan

--
Prof. Dr. Jan Bredereke
University of Applied Sciences Bremen, Germany.
http://homepages.hs-bremen.de/~jbredereke GnuPG key available.

[Alvaro]

Thank you Mark and Jan. 

Mark was right. It was a Miktex issue that I could now solve. I had to change the repository in mpm to be able to update some files needed for beamer to work fine. The unpleasent thing about it is that I also had to turn the windows firewall off to do it! 

Beamer now seems to be producing nice pdf files. But I still do not get dvi files. You may wonder why I want to see the dvi, since users seem to agree on that nowadays (good pcs capabilities) there is basically no advantage of dvi over pdf while there are some disadvantages (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/112268/pdf-vs-dvi-vs-postscript?lq=1). However, I still use dvi because (i) I do not have to close the dvi file to compile and substitute it while I do have to close a pdf to write it again, so I have to close the pdf file and open it again each time I want to check whether my text is working, and (ii) while the dvi output is shown exactly in the point of my text in which I am working, so it is easy to check that the last change produces the outcome I was looking for, in the pdf file I have to open the file and search for the last change. I guess there is a wiser way of doing things with the pdf outcome and I would very much appreciate any suggestions.

Regards,

Alvaro

[Mark Yagnatinsky]

What previewer are you using?  TeXworks, which comes with MikTeX, does not require closing the pdf.  The moment you finish compiling, the changes are visible.

[Jan Bredereke]

Mark wrote:
> What previewer are you using? TeXworks, which comes with MikTeX, does not
> require closing the pdf. The moment you finish compiling, the changes are
> visible.

I agree with the original poster Alvaro that it is vital to the
workflow that the viewer reloads automatically.

For Linux users: I use okular, which can do this.

Best regards,

[Alvaro]

Thanks Mark. I must confess I am reluctant to leave texcnic center to move to teXworks. It is just that I am getting used to it. But following your hint, I googled the issue and found a solution suggested by Rob Hyndman: use SumatraPDF. It works nicely! More at http://superuser.com/questions/337011/windows-pdf-viewer-that-auto-refreshes-pdf-when-compiling-with-pdflatex.

[Mark Yagnatinsky]

I've heard good things about Sumatra.  Glad you're able to finally use pdf instead of dvi :)

One of the nice things about pdf is that you can use a computer without LaTeX installed to display your presentation, if some emergency required it.

As a bonus, you can use the microtype package now and will probably never get a badbox warning again!

(Probably not very useful for beamer though.)

[Jan Bredereke]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016, Mark Yagnatinsky wrote:
> I've heard good things about Sumatra. Glad you're able to finally use pdf
> instead of dvi :)
> One of the nice things about pdf is that you can use a computer without
> LaTeX installed to display your presentation, if some emergency required it.
> As a bonus, you can use the microtype package now and will probably never
> get a badbox warning again!
> (Probably not very useful for beamer though.)

Mark, thanks for the hint to the microtype package, which I didn't
know about. Indeed, it is probably not very useful für beamer. But
for all my other LaTeX documents, it helps to further improve line
breaking and having less "overfull hbox" warnings.

<not serious>
So, I will not have to start using snakes for line justification, as
recently proposed by Randall Munroe:

http://www.xkcd.com/1676/

</not serious>

Regards,

[Mark Yagnatinsky]

Re: snakes.

But you can if you want too!
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/307795/how-to-create-nonbreaking-arbitrary-length-snakes-for-full-width-justification

[Jan Bredereke]

ouch! Nothing in typography is impossible for the LaTeX gurus -- I
should have known that one of them would take up that challenge.

[Mark Yagnatinsky]

> ouch! Nothing in typography is impossible for the LaTeX gurus -- I
> should have known that one of them would take up that challenge.

Or four of them, in this case :)