[OS X TeX] problem with \renewcommand{}{\arabic{}}

[Herbert Schulz]

On Dec 26, 2008, at 3:55 PM, Fabienne Goldfarb wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am a new member of the list and I have a problem I hope some of  
> you can help me to solve
> I recently moved from an PowerBook to a MacBook and thus I  
> reinstalled LaTeX. I used MacTeX2008, and nearly everything works,  
> except a bug with numberizing with arabic numbers. I use the  
> following commands in the beginning of my TeX files :  
> \renewcommand{\thechapter}{\Alph{chapter} -- }
> \renewcommand{\thesection}{\Roman{section} -- }
> \renewcommand{\thesubsection}{\Roman{section}.\arabic{subsection}}
>
> the last one doesn't work : instead of numbers, I have  
> "subsection ...." (it is written "subsection" instead of the number  
> as if the counter doesn't work). I have the same problem with the  
> figures numbers if I use \renewcommand
>
> If I use the command \roman instead of \arabic, it works.
> If I don't use the \renewcommand it works also (but I don't want  
> this way of counting the subsections)
> And if I use the same file on the PC I have at work (with MiKTeX),  
> it works too so it is not linked to a badly written command.
>
> I redownloaded macTeX and reinstalled. I "cleaned" my computer with  
> Onyx. Reinstalled again MacTex. It still doesn't work.
>
> Thanks for your help
>
> Fabienne Goldfarb (from France : sorry for possible english mistakes)

Howdy,

Sorry, in a small sample file using the book class I have no problem  
with your commands. I'm using MacTeX 2008 too. Could you supply a  
short but complete sample file that shows this problem. Have you done  
any updating of your MacTeX system? Do you have any files in you  
personal texmf tree (~/Library/texmf/... where ~ is you HOME  
directory) that might be interfering with the MacTeX distribution?

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)