[R-sig-Debian] [OT] LaTeX peculiarities in Ubuntu 9.10 beta

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 19 October 2009 at 13:41, Douglas Bates wrote:
| I am running the beta test version of Ubuntu 9.10, x86_64 on a machine
| and encountered some peculiarities in LaTeX called through
| 
| R-devel CMD texi2pdf file.tex
| 
| The tilde character in the input, which should produce a non-breaking
| space, is now being rendered as a tilde.  Does anyone know where I
| could begin exploring for explanations and/or workarounds?

With Kurt and myself.  :-)

We had a years-long buglet where R builds "broke" latexing for alpha/beta/rc
releases such as the one I made this morning. Here, I use a scheme such as
R-2.9.10~20091019 in both the package version and the build directory as dpkg
sorts this lower than plain old R-2.9.10 and the final releases will cleanly
replace the alpha/beta/rc variants.  However, this then broke the texinfo-to-pdf
conversion as texinfo et al choked over the ~ in the directory name.  So all
alpha/beta/rc build has essentially no pdf manuals.

I think the last thing I heard from Kurt on this a few months back was that
the 'feature' you observed had appeared. I am a little fuzzy on the details
but maybe Kurt can fill in.

But FWIW latex'ing this

  \documentclass[12pt]{article}

  \begin{document}

  Here are two~words separated by a tilde.

  \end{document}

does not show a tilde in the pdf that resulted on Debian testing, with the
packages below.  Maybe an Ubuntu bug report is needed?  My two machines with
9.10 beta are currently unreachable for me.

Dirk

edd at ron:~> COLUMNS=74 dpkg -l | grep texlive
ii  texlive-base   2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Essential programs and files
ii  texlive-base-b 2007.dfsg.2-7  TeX Live: Essential binaries
ii  texlive-common 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Base component
ii  texlive-doc-ba 2007.dfsg.2-2  TeX Live: Base documentation
ii  texlive-extra- 2007.dfsg.2-7  TeX Live: TeX auxiliary programs
ii  texlive-fonts- 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Recommended fonts
ii  texlive-generi 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: Miscellaneous extra generic macros
ii  texlive-generi 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Miscellaneous generic macros
ii  texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Basic LaTeX packages
ii  texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: LaTeX supplementary packages
ii  texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: LaTeX recommended packages
ii  texlive-pictur 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Packages for drawings graphics
ii  texlive-scienc 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: Typesetting for natural and comput
edd at ron:~> 

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.