[OT] LaTeX peculiarities in Ubuntu 9.10 beta

Dirk Eddelbuettel writes:

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. ?:-)

Actually, I recently talked to Karl Berry about this, and he will modify
upstream so that the tilde magic only gets performed for texinfo
sources. ?(He did not apply the patch to upstream yet, though.)

Best
-k

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:~>

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