[pracjourn-forum] For our collection of errors

[Peter Flynn]

On Sat, 9 Jul 2005 20:12:52 -0400, Karl Berry wrote
> If your output is has section headings that are single letters, you
>     left the braces off after \section
> 
> Although we've talked about this at length, this is the first actual
> error anyone has sent :).  So now I've created a simple web page with
> it, http://tug.org/errors.html.  I didn't link it anywhere yet since 
> I didn't have the brains right now to write up a little intro.  If anyone
> can contribute some brief description of what we're trying to accomplish
> to put at the beginning, that would be great.

It would need to explain that LaTeX commands come in two flavours:
a) those which stand by themselves, like \tableofcontents
b) those which need information after them, like \chapter{Introduction}

Only then can you explain that if you forget the curly braces in (b),
LaTeX will take the first printable symbol and use that, and the rest
just becomes text, so \chapter Introduction will give you a chapter
with the title I and the first paragraph beginning ntroduction.

If you forget just the opening curly brace, but include the closing one,
then LaTeX will treat the closing curly brace as an error because there
was no matching opening one.

///Peter