Change tracking and equations

digl · Post by **digl** » Wed Jun 14, 2017 7:30 pm

Hello everyone, I come to ask for help with change tracking and equations please.

The problem seems to be that when I try to produce a document showing the changes (using change tracking), and the document has equations, I get lots of "missing \cr" "missing \endgroup" etc. As I am working on a huge document with lots of childs, equations, tables, subappendices, etc., there are other issues (not critical) in the rest of the document, and things add up to 100 errors and I can't compile. I'm using LyX 2.2.2.

When I tried creating a MWE (attached), I realised that it compiles, but the output stops being produced after a certain point. It was hard to create a proper MWE, but the document attached shows the problem. And when I have this as a part of the big parent document, it means 100 errors. Fixing the other, unrelated errors wouldn't be enough anyway, because apparently I can get 100 errors only from this particular part of the document and this problem.

Some things I have realised:

- Using dvipdfm the problem appears to be reduced or eliminated, but it collides with other things I have in the document so I still cannot compile the big parent document.
- The issue is not necessarily with striking out the equations: if I leave the equations unchanged, but delete (with change tracking) the section title, the same problem occurs (missing things inserted, lots of errors). I could not make a MWE of this, but it happens in the big document. If I leave the section title unchanged, it compiles fine (showing changes correctly in the rest of the document).
- In a previous version of the document (from days ago, with changes in many different places), that part of the text was deleted (with change tracking) and the document did compile and show all the text. But, there was no sout of the deleted text (it was in red but not striked out, and the added text in blue). This happen from a point in the document onwards, the first parts had the sout fine.

I'm pretty lost with this, any help is appreciated. Thanks!

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Post by **scottkosty** » Sat Jun 17, 2017 8:14 am

digl, thanks for this high-quality post. It's always fun to help when you see the OP put in a lot of effort into testing and reporting their issue. The bug is fixed in the development version of LyX. Can you confirm that the attached PDF the correct output?

In the future, can you please report such issues on https://www.lyx.org/trac ? Your feedback would be very helpful for improving LyX!

Post by **scottkosty** » Sat Jun 17, 2017 8:14 am

PDF is attached.

digl · Post by **digl** » Tue Jun 20, 2017 2:38 pm

Thanks scottkosty, good to know that you appreciate the detailed questions! I post questions online (for LyX and others) only when nothing I read on previous posts works, and I try to explain everything I've tried.

The pdf is what I expected as output. Is the diagonal line somehow related to the bug that was fixed? I don't remember seeing those before. Good to know that it was fixed, but I'll probably stay with my current solution (manually inserting a line saying there was an equation there) instead of takings risks with the development version, I need this for an important submission.

And in the future I will report things there, glad to be of any help!

Post by **scottkosty** » Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:51 pm

Thanks scottkosty, good to know that you appreciate the detailed questions! I post questions online (for LyX and others) only when nothing I read on previous posts works, and I try to explain everything I've tried.

Thank you for that! I think that knowing how to write a detailed and clear question like that is an important skill.

digl wrote: The pdf is what I expected as output. Is the diagonal line somehow related to the bug that was fixed? I don't remember seeing those before. Good to know that it was fixed, but I'll probably stay with my current solution (manually inserting a line saying there was an equation there) instead of takings risks with the development version, I need this for an important submission.

This is a smart decision. Actually, even when the final 2.3.0 is released you might want to resist temptation and wait until 2.3.1 is released. LyX is not particularly unstable---I make this recommendation for any major software updates.

digl wrote: And in the future I will report things there, glad to be of any help!

Great! I look forward to seeing more feedback from you. The only way LyX gets better is high-quality bug reports. For any non-bug-report questions, this forum is great. It is low volume, but we have some LaTeX experts here that are extremely helpful. This is also one of the most positive forums around, which is one of the reasons I'm happy to be a part of it.

digl · Post by **digl** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 3:50 pm

it's great to have forums like this and experts that help people out. One question though...how would you tell if something is a bug to report as such, or just something that I'm getting wrong and can't figure it out? Thinking of where to post if I come up with something like this in the future.

Post by **scottkosty** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 8:23 pm

digl wrote:it's great to have forums like this and experts that help people out. One question though...how would you tell if something is a bug to report as such, or just something that I'm getting wrong and can't figure it out?

Excellent question. The only answer I can think of is "experience". That said, no matter how much experience one has, everyone misdiagnoses a bug once in a while.

digl wrote: Thinking of where to post if I come up with something like this in the future.

The best place to ask whether something is a bug or not is lyx-users. You can join the mailing list here: http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/. It is a friendly list and about 5-10 messages a day (which you can filter to go to a separate folder in your email).

But the initial place you choose to post is not that important. What is important is that you be persistent. If you post in a forum like here, and a LyX developer doesn't happen to see your post, and no one answers, it's possible that a LyX bug is not reported and thus not fixed. But if you are persistent and you either bump your thread, or you keep asking your question politely until you get an answer, then I'm not worried that a potential bug will go unreported/unfixed.

On https://www.lyx.org/trac we often get bug reports that aren't actually bugs in the end. And as long as the bug report is written with details and is polite, we are happy to receive such false positives because we know that some of the time we will receive important bug reports. The only bug reports that make LyX developers frustrated are the impolite ones along the lines of "this is a LyX bug and I can't believe you horrible people haven't fixed this yet. I'm not going to use this horrible software anymore because of this." Of course, you might spend your time to write a beautiful bug report and in the end we might give you a dry "not a LyX bug because blah" and close the bug report, but don't think that we don't appreciate your effort.

digl · Post by **digl** » Tue Jun 27, 2017 6:06 pm

Thanks again scottkosty for the thorough answer! no more questions...for now!

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LyX ⇒ Change tracking and equations