Re: Bug#354554: foiltex: support TexLive

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp> wrote:

> but as far as I investigated the problem, the problem
> was caused from the following lines;
>
> \newcommand{\iispc}{\space\space}
> \newcommand{\vspc}{\iispc\iispc\space}
>
> and if I changed them to
>
> \def\iispc{\space\space}
> \def\vspc{\iispc\iispc\space}
>
> then problem disappeared.  Could someone teach me why \newcommand 
> caused such errors, which never occured before (in tetex2.0)?

AFAIK, the difference is that \newcommand

- checks whether the macro is already defined, and

- uses \long\def instead of \def, meaning that the argument of the macro
  may contain a \par. 

How that can cause your problem, that I do not know.  And I am also
unaware of any changes between the LaTeX in tetex 2.0.2 and the one in
3.0.  If you are not satisfied with a working file, but want to know
what's going on, you could use TeX's tracing commands, namely

\tracingmacros=1  % show macro expansion, e.g. what does \newcommand
                  % expand to?
\tracingcommands=1 % show primitives like \par
\tracingonline=1 % only if you use AUCTeX, without it the tracing output 
                 % is only in the log file

and compare the different versions, or check where the error in fact
comes from.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)