[clug] pdflatex regressions?

[Hal Ashburner]

The app calls pdflatex. It does this because you can include .png 
graphics by path in your .tex.
Where I said latex completes without error, I was lying and didn't know it.
It also fails on 100 errors that are the same ad pdflatex, it just 
writes out almost all of the output (minus the charts and images) to the 
.dvi file which other than images & truncations looks like it should.


Andrew Janke wrote:
> I am sure I am missing something but why not just the more "normal" route:
>
>    foo.tex -> foo.dvi  (latex)
>
>    dvipdf foo.dvi foo.pdf
>
> and dodge pdflatex altogether?
>
>
> a
>
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 17:46, Hal Ashburner <hal.ashburner at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hey people,
>> I had to do a sever upgrade from sarge->etch->lenny on a machine that uses
>> pdflatex to generate some complicated reports as part of an application it's
>> running.
>> There's a .tex template that gets filled repeatedly for different reports
>> and when it works you get very pretty pdf documents.
>> pdflatex appears to have developped some issues over 5 years with respect to
>> errors. Now latex errors have always been hideously unhelpful but this is a
>> new level of unhelpful. It's reporting errors every time \bfseries is used.
>> running latex on the same .tex produces no such error. It also produces a
>> wonderful error that reads:
>> Dimensions can be in units of em, ex, in pt, pc cm, mm, dd, cc, nd, nc, bp
>> or sp; but yours is a new one!
>> It does this for pt and mm for reasons I don't understand.
>> None of these errors matter at all except that when it gets to 100 it
>> executes the
>> if (errors > 100) { // yay for magic numbers in the middle of source
>> stuff_you_I_hate_you();
>> }
>>
>> The only solution I can see that doesn't require me to learn tex and
>> re-write all of latex, which would be a task worthy of Sisyphus,  is to  get
>> the source from debian, adjust the magic number to a bazillion and install
>> it locally.
>>
>> Any better ideas?
>> Anyone seen all kinds of random breakages on upgrade using tabularx and
>> colortbl latex packages?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Hal
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>>
>>