To err is human

Abstract

In some ways TEX is not completely divine. TEX will respond to invalid input by giving an error message to the screen if you are using it interactively and will also send that message to the log file. Because TEX is very complicated, the actual point where the error is detected may be deep within the program, so a full report of the error may be rather long and involved. Not only that, TEX will try to recover from errors, and will report what was done in that process. For this reason, the reading of error messages may be a little difficult and somewhat intimidating for the uninitiated. The key is to know what is important from your perspective and what can be safely ignored. So let’s look at some typical errors and the messages that they generate.