"possible bug" report -- not a request for help.
Leigh Clayton
directly.
I have found a bug (or at least, a subtle difference between two versions) in
TeX. I am not complaining per se -- I have fixed it up in my document and I'm
OK. But it took me a while to sort out and I thought whoever maintains this
version of TeX might be interested. I couldn't seem to figure out who that is,
but hopefully this will get to you somehow.
I was moving a large document (the new APL ISO standard) from an old system
[Dell SVR4.0, TeX was "C Version 3.14t3"] to my new server (Redhat 6.1), where
TeX displays the following for --version:
TeX (Web2C 7.3.1) 3.14159
kpathsea version 3.3.1
Copyright (C) 1999 D.E. Knuth.
Kpathsea is copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
There is NO warranty. Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the TeX copyright and
the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the files
named COPYING and the TeX source.
Primary author of TeX: D.E. Knuth.
Kpathsea written by Karl Berry and others.
Due to the size of the document I am dealing with, and the amount of custom
style code, I decided to just move LaTeX (2.09) as a whole, along with the
fonts it used, and run it with the new TeX. What I ran into was --
-----------------------------------------------
LaTeX error. See LaTeX manual for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
! Missing \begin{document}.
\@latexerr ...for immediate help.}\errmessage {#1}
-----------------------------------------------
I finally tracked this down to a line in one of my style documents which was
supposed to be a comment, and which read as follows:
----------------------
%.se LJDmax = '^M'
----------------------
where the ^M is in fact hex 0D, that is an ASCII CR character. The new TeX
seems to treat this as a line-end, leading to the error since the trailing "'"
is not then considered to be a comment.
As I said, I am not complaining about this, for all I know this is correct and
the old TeX is incorrect for failing to emit the error. But I thought you might
like to know about it in case it is something you should fix, or maybe
document. (Assuming you haven't of course; I have looked around for
documentation but I may have missed it).
(The reason for the rather misleading error is that we are compiling a format
here and shouldn't attempt to build any output. Once I grasped what was
happening it didn't take too long to figure out, but there are many occurrances
of this error in various mailing lists, mostly unresolved, but all appearing to
be related to moving incompletely to LaTeX2e. This mislead me, and I spent
quite a while trying to figure out where the new LaTeX code might be sneaking
into my (supposedly old) format run.)
Anyway, thanks a lot for the software, and I hope that this report is helpful
(or at least, not too annoying).
Thanks a lot ../Leigh