General ⇒ Strange full/multipage bars from changebar package

[ronbrender]

About five years ago I used the changebar package extensively while working on a several hundred page technical specification. Was using it in TeXworks 0.4.5 I'm pretty sure. changebar.sty says it is v3.5c. Loved it, it worked great and it never gave any trouble.

This year a revision activity has started and I am picking up where I left off. I did upgrade TeXworks to 0.6.6. Otherwise everything is the same (not sure whether the W7 to W10 upgrade occurred in the time window--probably).

Now I am getting strange full page, even multipage, change bars that sometimes appear on pages without any changebar commands. Deleting .aux files and restarting does not help. I reinstalled the earlier 0.4.5 version and it didn't help. In other parts of the document, changebars are working as expected.

Using the \nochangebars command does get rid of all changebars (which is against the purpose but does seem to implicate the changebar package itself as the culprit?).

I am running out of ideas for what might be going on. About the only thing I haven't tried yet is to do a real uninstall of both versions and then re-install from scratch. So far I have skipped the uninstall but maybe...

Any other ideas or suggestions will be appreciated.

Ron

[ronbrender]

Found it!

I was attempting to use a \cbstart \cbend pair on text that was inside one of the figures drawn with the tikz graphics packages. While the graphic itself did not seem to be affected, the combination obviously messed up the internal bookkeeping of the changebar package leading to truly bizarre full- and multipage change bars at apparently random places. Removed those two commands and all is well throughout the rest of the document.

Bottom line: the tikz and changebar packages don't mix.