The memoir class - The UK TeX Archive

F. THE TERRORS OF ERRORSF.1 TEX MESSAGESThe following is an alphabetical list of some of TeX’s messages, abbreviated in some cases,together with their corresponding remarks. As an example of how these appear on yourterminal, if you had a line in your source that read:resulting in $x^3^4$.then TeX would output this:! Double superscriptl.102 resulting in $x^3^4^$.?If you typed h in response to this you would then see:I treat ‘x^1^2’ essentially like ‘x^1{}^2’.TeX’s messages start with ! followed by the particular message text. The second linestarts l. and a number, which is the number of the line in your file where the error is. Thisis followed by the text of the line itself up to the point where the error was detected, andthe next line in the report shows the rest of the erroneous line. The last line of the report isa ? and TeX awaits your response.In the listing I have used this font for the error message and this font for thecomment message.! A box was supposed to be here.I was expecting to see \hbox or \vbox or \copy or \box or something like that. So youmight find something missing in your output. But keep trying; you can fix this later.! Argument of ... has an extra }.I’ve run across a ‘}’ that doesn’t seem to match anything. For example, ‘\def\a#1{...}’and ‘\a}’ would produce this error. If you simply proceed now, the \par that I’ve justinserted will cause me to report a runaway argument that might be the root of the problem.But if your ‘}’ was spurious, just type ‘2’ and it will go away.In LaTeX terms, the example can be translated into‘\newcommand{\a}[1]{...}’ and ‘\a}’.If you can’t find the extra } it might be that you have used a fragile command ina moving argument. Footnotes or math in division titles or captions are a fruitfulsource for this kind of error. You shouldn’t be putting footnotes into titles that willget listed in the ToC. For maths, put \protect before each fragile command.! Arithmetic overflow.I can’t carry out that multiplication or division, since the result is out of range.The maximum number that TeX can deal with is 2,147,483,647 and it balks at dividingby zero.! Dimension too large.I can’t work with sizes bigger than about 19 feet. Continue and I’ll use the largest value Ican.448