[pracjourn-forum] Re: a weird error

[Christina Thiele]

I sent this reply to Peter Flom directly, but now that Peter Flynn's
(can't even say Peter F anymore! ;-) ) just posted a comment on
dealing with errors, perhaps this might be part of the discussion.

Ch.

=====

Forwarded message:
> From cthiele Fri May  6 10:12:23 2005
> Subject: Re: [pracjourn-forum] A weird error
> To: flom at ndri.org (Peter Flom)
> Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 10:12:23 -0400 (EDT)
> In-Reply-To: <no.id> from "Peter Flom" at May 06, 2005 08:14:10 AM
> X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL5]
> Content-Length: 1484      
> 
> Peter Flom writes:
> > 
> > Thanks for this tip.  It turns out, though, that the problem was one of
> > pdfLaTeX vs. LaTeX......see Karl's reply.
> 
> Yes, I saw. If I'd known you were running pdflatex, I could have told
> you right away that pstricks is incompatible. 
> 
> I _have_ to use pstricks in my linguistics typesetting, so the only
> way I can generate .pdf files is to do the .dvi --> .ps --> .pdf
> route, using dvips (that's the printer driver) to get to .ps, and then
> ps2pdf to get from .ps to .pdf. 
> 
> It's not a major issue in terms of time to go the long way 'round ;-)
> and it allows me to still use pstricks. 
> 
> So, I guess the moral is:
> 
>   when reporting a problem, you have to specify what you're actually
>   using to read and process a file: plain TeX, LaTeX, pdfTeX, pdfLaTeX
>   ... and there may well be others. 
> 
> > Thanks
> > 
> > Peter
> > 
> > ...
> 
> I'm enjoying your messages because you're doing a good job of
> reminding us all that being a new TeX user is pretty much as
> perplexing now as it was when we were the new users. Indeed, in some
> ways it more complex in that there are more variables/options at each
> stage, each of which has its own significance. 
> 
> So perhaps what one needs initially is some kind of checklist of
> details which should be part of any query, so that there isn't this
> `Oh, I didn't know you needed to know _that_!' cycle ... where the
> experienced users get all hoity-toity and the new user feels like
> they've just been squashed for asking a simple question. 
> 
> Ch.
>