Dear Max, list,

thank you very much for your advice.

It helped, to a certain degree, that is: getting rid of "\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}" solved some cases when TeX’ing by way of the speedier LaTeX bundles had failed before. However, other problems remain.

To me, the situation is rather erratic, and I can’t really figure it out.

First of all, it is true that over the years I added stuff to my preamble file (I added packages just as needed in some particular cases, but kept them in the one preamble I use, just to make sure that any file would TeX successfully and in order to not have to figure out what package is necessary in a specific case. Because all packages I ever needed would be included in the linked in preamble. Seems to me like like a reasonable strategy.)

This procedure worked really well for me. Besides, I don’t think I have a particularly over-crowded preamble in the first place (see below).

And I never ran into any kind of problem when using TM’s standard LaTeX bundle. This holds till today.

Now, when using one or the other of the "speedier" bundles (of course, the situation gets more complicated due to there being three forked versions of the speedier bundle, cf. my previous mail), I encounter strange and different problems. In cases TeXing proceeds, though, the processing is indeed much faster than with the standard bundle, so that keeps me motivated to figure things out.

Problems with the speedier bundles look like this (different in different cases): during TeXing, the bundle claims unspecified problems with the linked in (via \input) preamble file (there is just a line in the typesetting window mentioning the preamble file; just mentioning, no error code, no explanation); it claims unspecified problems with some packages; it claims not to be able to find the file to be TeXed; it fails to open the PDF in Skim, but opens it then in Preview instead. Really, this is confusing. And, again, there is not one case where the standard bundle doesn’t succeed and Skim successfully displays the PDF.

Okay, as a starting point, may I take the opportunity and kindly ask your patience to have a look at my preamble, which is, after all, not that convoluted:

\documentclass[a4paper]{report} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage[ngerman, german, french, english]{babel} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{amssymb, graphics, graphicx, color, latexsym, url, float}% , \usepackage[normalem]{ulem} % \sout zum Durchstreichen, \uwave für wellige Unterstreichung \setlength{\parindent}{0em}

\hyphenation{ [quite a few German words, helping LaTeX with hyphenation] }

\newcommand{ ... \newenvironment{ ... [some user-defined commands and environments -- I don’t think they could be the culprit]

That’s it.

Any idea what could cause trouble?

Any hint what strategy to pursue in order to figure out what’s going on? I’m willing to start from scratch to make this work. For instance, the log-files do not provide much help; they show just some TeX statistics.

Just to complete my local state of things LaTeX: I recently installed a fresh copy of TeXLive 2012 (from tug.org/mactex/); up till then I ran "TeXLive 2008 Basic" (for a long time, there seemed to be no need to upgrade). The motivation to upgrade was specifically to be able to run the speedier TM bundles (I understood that they were not compatible with "old" TeX distributions), and also to have a look at some of the competing editors, like Sublime Text 2, Chocolat, just to check things out.

Okay, sorry for being lengthy. Help would be awesome.

Best, --Hans

On 29.10.2012, at 01:59, Max Lein wrote:

...

When trying to typeset a letter, where my preamble looks different and has the following line in it:

\usepackage[applemac]{inputenc}

the typesetting window will claim a problem with respect to this line:

"inputenc.sty:40: [...]"

When I comment out the \usepackage-line in the source, typesetting proceeds successfully (and VERY fast), though all special characters get omitted (to be able to use German umlaute like ?, etc is what the inputenc package should provide for).

I suspect your file has been saved as UTF8 (which you should use if at all possible anyway). So change the inputenc argument to

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

and recompile. In my experience, UTF8 works best, but if you have cross-platform collaborators, you may need to work in latin1. I would strongly discourage you from using applemac encoding this day and age.

Max