On Tue 09 Jan 2018 at 19:41:35 (+0000), Curt wrote: > On 2018-01-09, Brian <a...@cityscape.co.uk> wrote: > >> >> > >> >> If you're dealing with latex files, as I have taken some minutes to > >> >> discover (cough), you need 'pdflatex', not pdftex, which will barf > >> >> immediately upon encountering latex commands. > >> > > >> > So could you now elaborate on step 1 of this "one-step" process? > >> > > >> > Cheers, > >> > David. > >> > >> Like the other, more knowledgeable guy said. > > > > There are quite a few in this thread. Clue us in? > > The person who responded directly to David's question quoted above, > whose name, exotic in the regions from which I hail, escapes my > remembrance. > > >> pdftex will actually create a pdf out of a text file without complaint > >> if you put '\end' on a newline at the end of the text file (I wouldn't > >> recommend such a bare-bones approach, though, in my extremely limited > >> experience, for formatting reasons). Or you can just type '\end' in the > >> little interactive mode that comes up in the terminal when errors or > >> omissions are encountered. > > > > My pdftex complained madly about this and eventually threw the towel > > in. > > I can't account for it. If I feed pdftex a latex file, it whines for > every latex command it encounters, but if I press enter on each > encountered command error in the interactive console (if that is indeed > the term for it) it eventually exits completely (maybe it wants me to > '\end') , producing a pdf file (the text of which comprises both the > unknown latex commands as plain old text as well as the text as, well, > pdf-style text, if you catch my drift).
For me, this is a new take on document conversion methods. FWIW my test file produced 30819 "Missing character" errors which is hardly surprising as TeX was released 40 years ago in the days of 7 bit ASCII. The PDF had a single line of characters running off the right hand side of the page. Cheers, David.
