[OS X TeX] TL2003 vs. TL2004

[Bruno Voisin]

Claus Gerhardt wrote:

> Having used both  TL2003 and TL2004 in recent weeks, let me share my 
> experiences with you: In TL 2003 metapost and htlatex was broken for me; 
> on the other hand, after applying Bruno's babel patch, TL2004  runs fine 
> and faster than TL2003 with the only (minor) exception that the option 
> 'nowrite' in mpfic may not be used.

Claus, according to tests done off-list with your file brane2d.tex, it seems the last problem is a mere incompatibility between mfpic.tex and the latest version of supp-mis.tex, shipped with TL2004. In any case this is the error message I get with brane2d.tex, and which does not happen with TL2003:

	(/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/tex/context/base/supp-mis.tex
	loading : Context Support Macros / Miscellaneous (2004.10.26)
	\protectiondepth=\count159
	! Undefined control sequence.
	<argument> ...tname \donetrue \else ^^M\donefalse 
	                                                  \fi \fi ^^M^^M\ifdone ^^M\...
	l.298 \ifnocontextobject \smashbox \do

This only shows up when the [nowrite] option to {mfpic} is called for. Could you confirm this is indeed the error message you're getting?

Concerning the babel + amsart bug, it would be nice if you could report it to the LaTeX maintainers (especially the babel maintainer Johannes Braams): this is a generic problem, not linked with any specific platform, so having it fixed as soon as possible would be beneficial for the LaTeX community at large. Unfortunately I'm too short of time to do it myself. <http://www.latex-project.org/bugs.html>
                                      
> Of course your experiences may differ depending on the packages you use, 
> but for someone with similar usage behaviour my recommendation is clear: 
> to install TL2004 (after having uninstalled the old installation 
> completely - except your personal texmf).

There's another unsolved problem, which is the dreaded "[][][][][][][][]..." bug affecting some XeTeX users (XeTeX entering an infinite loop of "[][][][][][][][]..." in the console log, requiring to force-quit the TeX front-end). My impression is that this is not linked with TL2004 in particular, but with some memory configuration changes, brought in /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf by the TeX i-Package on 28 November and affecting both the TL2003 and TL2004 setups after that date. Is there some other user of XeTeX 0.88 here who would experience the opposite (same bug with previous versions of gwTeX, or no bug with more recent versions of gwTeX), so that we know the problem lies elsewhere?

Bruno Voisin
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