[pracjourn-forum] Re: a weird error

[Peter Flynn]

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 15:19, Christina Thiele wrote:
> I sent this reply to Peter Flom directly, but now that Peter Flynn's
> (can't even say Peter F anymore! ;-) ) 

Oh dear :-)

> > Peter Flom writes:
> > > 
> > > Thanks for this tip.  It turns out, though, that the problem was one of
> > > pdfLaTeX vs. LaTeX......see Karl's reply.

I did run it through pdflatex and it gave me the usual Non-PDF special
ignored! messages, which you'd expect with pstricks-->pdflatex, but it
didn't gag on c at lor@to at ps at all.

> > 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. 

I think WinEdt lets you program a button to do all this on one click.
Some other editors may let you do this too. 

It's a shame Adobe won't allow Acrobat Reader to watch a file and
refresh when it changes, like gv does (and maybe xpdf too). 

> > It's not a major issue in terms of time to go the long way 'round ;-)
> > and it allows me to still use pstricks. 

I agree...maybe have a look at pdftricks, which circumvents this:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/pdftricks.html
but it only works with the web2c forks of TeX, which may exclude MikTeX.

> > 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

Yes indeed. Another black mark for my doc, which omits to say this.

> >   ... and there may well be others. 

ConTeXt, eTeX.

[Christina again]
> > 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. 

We all need a good KITA from time to time.

> > 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. 

My daughter gets like that when I ask her to preprogram the video timer
to record something :-)

///Peter