[OS X TeX] Excalibur error

[Themis Matsoukas]

On Aug 2, 2014, at 9:47 AM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:

> 
> On Aug 1, 2014, at 11:47 PM, John B. Thoo <jthoo at yccd.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Hi, everyone.
>> 
>> I am trying to use Excalibur to spell check.  When I open a LaTeX file in Excalibur, I get this warning box
>> 
>> -----------------------------------------------------
>> | Excalibur stopped processing on line 2427 because |
>> | of a LaTeX error.                                 |
>> |                                                   |
>> | Extra } or \end                                   |
>> -----------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> I don't know if this is important or not, but this file is not the main .tex file, and is called using \include.  However, the .tex file processes using pdflatex without any problems.  Moreover, when I go to line 2427 of this file, I don't see a problem.  Can you shed any light on this for me?
>> 
>> Excalibur 4.0.7
>>   In Preferences > LaTeX is checked
>>   - Do LaTeX command parsing
>>     - Ignore \tt text
>>     - Warn on parsing errors
>>   - Use extended character set
>> 
>> MacOS X 10.8.5
>> 
>> Thank you.
>> 
>> ---John.
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> I'm not a user of Excalibur but with my small experience with it I've noticed that it is very particular about how arguments are formatted; e.g. \setlength{\fboxsep}{0pt} is fine but \setlength\fboxsep{0pt} will throw an error eveen though it's perfectly legal TeX since \fboxsep is a single token. The error message you are getting is not the one I get with the error mentioned above but I'd look for something like that in the area around line 2427.
> 
> Good Luck,
> 
> Herb Schulz
> (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)
> 

The likely reason is that Excalibur needs to know exactly how many arguments a command has in order to skip over them.

Themis