[texhax] Migrating from Windows to Mac

[Senthil Kumar M]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Tom Backer Johnsen <backer at psych.uib.no> wrote:
<Snipped>
> Thank you for the information.  The command you recommended worked, or at
> least without yielding an error message.  However, I had the same error
> message as before:
>
> This is pdfTex, Version 3 ...
> entering extended mode
> (.second.tex
> ! Undefined control sequence.
> 1.5 \documentclass
>   [10pt,a4paper]{article}
>
> So, assuming that your command worked, it cannot be the line endings.
>
> Tom

The error message says "This is pdfTex...." As mentioned by Ulrike
Fischer earlier in the thread, you are probably using Plain TeX option
in TeXShop to parse a LaTeX file. Have you tried changing the option
from Plain TeX to LaTeX in TeXShop and running the file?

I also feel that you are using Plain TeX because, on my OS X command
prompt if I do the following, I get the same error with pdftex, but
not with pdflatex (sentences starting with ** or * are those that I
typed on the prompts of pdftex/pdflatex):

comb0d1:~ senthil$ pdftex
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009)

**\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}
entering extended mode
! Undefined control sequence.
<*> \documentclass
                  [10pt,a4paper]{article}
? x
No pages of output.


comb0d1:~ senthil$ pdflatex
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009)

**\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}
entering extended mode
LaTeX2e <2009/09/24>
Babel <v3.8l> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax, dumylang, noh
yphenation, german-x-2009-06-19, ngerman-x-2009-06-19, ancientgreek, ibycus, ar
abic, basque, bulgarian, catalan, pinyin, coptic, croatian, czech, danish, dutc
h, esperanto, estonian, farsi, finnish, french, galician, german, ngerman, mono
greek, greek, hungarian, icelandic, indonesian, interlingua, irish, italian, ku
rmanji, latin, latvian, lithuanian, mongolian, mongolian2a, bokmal, nynorsk, po
lish, portuguese, romanian, russian, sanskrit, serbian, slovak, slovenian, span
ish, swedish, turkish, ukenglish, ukrainian, uppersorbian, welsh, loaded.

*\begin{document} Hello World \end{document}

(/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
No file texput.aux.
[1{/usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}]
(./texput.aux)</usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/c
m/cmr10.pfb>
Output written on texput.pdf (1 page, 12019 bytes).
Transcript written on texput.log.


Hope this helps,

Senthil