Arch Linux

gauthma

Member

Registered: 2010-02-16

Posts: 222

Website

When LaTeX lost its quotes...

I am a happy Archlinux user -- and have been, for quite a few years now. But on some days, the sort of thing happens, that just makes me want to throw the effing computer onto the f*cking dust bin!! Today was one those days.

So I was writing my LaTeX document (which I compile with XeLaTeX), going about my own business, when I noted that quotes had stopping rendering properly! What I mean by this is the following: in LaTeX, one writes double quotes like so: ``foobar''. But after this update, the PDF actually showed what I had typed, i.e., the backticks and apostrophes, instead of the inverted commas!!

I put up the simplest document possible, and this problem still persisted. Eventually, I figured it out---and I share the solution with you, to save you the pain from going through the same hassle.

To cut a long story short, the aforementioned update replaced the (relatively big) package texlive-core, with the (much smaller) package texlive-basic. And one of the new replacement packages, that is NOT automatically installed, but turns out to be absolutely necessary for those of us using XeLaTeX, is texlive-xetex. That absence was the cause of all this conundrum---and of me losing hours of life that I ain't getting back.

Some days I really wish computers and software had never been invented...

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: When LaTeX lost its quotes...

texlive-xetex is part of texlive-meta.  Instead of posting a PSA-style post to inform others of something that is already in the news, you should just read that news item all the way to the end.

Perhaps you could post to the "Grr" thread as this would fit well there.  But this is clearly not a support request.

Last edited by Trilby (2023-07-11 00:18:52)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,583

Re: When LaTeX lost its quotes...

Some days I really wish computers and software had never been invented...

Just imagine... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ … 882%29.jpg

In any event, closing as this is well documented.

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