[clug] pdflatex regressions?

[Daniel Pittman]

Hal Ashburner <hal.ashburner at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

You might find a TUG more useful for this, since this is likely to be pretty
platform independent...

[...]

> 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.

Well, presumably it is seeing the measure incorrectly for some reason.  Sadly,
I can't speculate as to why.

> 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();
> }

IIRC, non-stop mode avoids the abort and just runs through?  Certainly, one of
the run-modes of TeX does that...

[...]

> Any better ideas?  Anyone seen all kinds of random breakages on upgrade
> using tabularx and colortbl latex packages?

Bite the bullet and port it to some typesetting or template system you do
understand?  I confess that, unhelpful as it is to say, I used ConTeXt because
of this sort of problem with LaTeX.

        Daniel
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