Freaking out with LaTeX

Published 2009-09-14 in sections English, Digital World.

If you want to play a trick on a colleague who is writing a LaTeX document: Open the file, copy the entire contents of the file and paste it at the very end. LaTeX will happily process the file and render the first part. But your colleague will likely try to edit the end of the file and soon feel haunted because his changes to the file have no effect – no matter how often he deletes the resulting PDF file or any intermediate file, how often he renames the original file or moves it somewhere else...

(Just happened to me, but not due to a mean colleague, but due to some accidential vim commands.)

Comments

When I'm revising, I often move paragraphs that I don't like below the \end{document}, so they are still easily available for reference but don't contribute to the rendered document. Or I put figures down there when they are messed up and I don't want to deal with it right then.

#1 Zack (Homepage) am 2009-09-14

Last year, I used to write LaTeX documents in Google Docs and someday all the content of a document get duplicated into the end of the file.

I corrected some errors and when I tried to compile, nothing changed. I needed nearly an hour to discover the problem.

#2 minaya am 2009-09-14

Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.

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