General ⇒ Commands confilct

[drpartha]

We often use several \usepackage in our documents. If there is a command say \partha defined in two packages, how does LaTeX find out or decide which \partha to use ? Does LaTeX give a error if there is such a conflict ? How do we find ou which two packages are conflicting ?

partha

[josephwright]

If the people who write the packages have used \newcommand, then an error will come up when the second definition is given. This is because \newcommand checks first to see if a definition exists before it does its work. On the other hand, if everything is done with \def then there will be no error: TeX is quite happy to overwrite definitions. Luckily, most people use \newcommand at least for user functions, so you should get errors in most clashing cases.