[texhax] dagger

[Philip G. Ratcliffe]

> Unkind.  Just as I remember.

Oh dear, here we go again.  

> I thought Robin quit this list, 

He had, unfortunately for those of us who very much appreciated his
contributions.

> [snip]
> the rest of the list didn't rally to his defense
> [snip]

Well, that's downright false: I for one "rallied" and so did others.

Whatever one might feel about Robin's approach, it appears to me rather odd
that you should be urged to drag up such a long-forgotten episode - the
words you quote were used over four and a half years ago and should have
remained buried there - why stir it all up again?

As to the case at hand, the poster (who is no newbie to the list) asked a
question he could have answered himself by merely looking at the output.
Given that, I'd rate Robin's remarks as nothing more that a gentle prod, but
then my skin is perhaps just a little thicker than others'.  However, I have
tacked on at then end of this posting the reply by Robin that sparked off
the first episode - for the life of me I just cannot see the unkindness.
Indeed, I found Uwe's reply far more out of proportion, just as now I find
Brock's (who apparently doesn't even bother to sign his postings.

Cheers all (especially to Robin),  Phil

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------
The original sin (Tue Nov 1 12:47:44 CET 2005):

> I'm writing up my work, or rather not at the moment. The problem comes 
> with trying to reference using bibtex. I can latex the document fine 
> (only with a warning that i'm using an out of date style format),

as i said in reply to this question on comp.text.tex, it's not a good
idea to persist with latex 209 compatibility mode.  make your document
a latex2e one, if at all possible

> i Then 
> bibtex it again with no problems. now when i latex the document i get 
> the following error.
> 
> [13.1] [14.1]) [15.1] (zthesis.bbl
> ! Undefined control sequence.
> <argument> \@listctr
> 
> l.3 \bibitem{str98}
> 
> ? (press return then the following)
> 
> ! You can't use `\relax' after \the.
> <recently read> \c@
> 
> l.3 \bibitem{str98}
> 
> ?
> 
> It does this for all the references written up into the .bbl file form 
> .bib.
> 
> Any help would be most gratefully appreciated,

it's fairly obvious you've got something completely broken up there,
yet you tell us *nothing* about it other than "it doesn't work".

produce a minimal example, and there's a good chance someone will
help.

as i said before:

http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=minxampl

robin