New Members ⇒ New to Latex

[hudu28]

I have only been using Latex in the past couple of months. It's worked very well for me, as I used it to write the prospectus of my PhD thesis. Now it just doesn't seem to work. it's giving me tonnes of error messages when I try to compile the same file I've been working on for the past 3 weeks. I've decided to join this community, hoping there will be people to help me out with those problems.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi hudu28,

welcome to this forum!
Feel free to open a new topic to describe the problem. The forum users including me will try to help.

The most efficient way to get help quickly is to post a minimal working example, perhaps together with a .log file produced by your compiler. Then we could compile it in order to find the problem and examine the error log.

Stefan

[hudu28]

Thanks very much Stefan,

I'm now searching the forum to see if someone has posted a similar problem. If I don't get it in my search, I'll post the problem. I've been stuck for the past 8 hours because latex won't compile my file.

[hudu28]

Thanks very much Stefan for pointing out the minimal working example to me.

I used it and was able to figure out the problem. It is now resolved.
It turned out that I made an error, combining a left bracket "(" with a right curly bracket "}", in a tabular environment, as in (bla bla bla}. It caused my compiler to stall, and I couldn't get even a single page out of my 40 page document. It took me more than 15 hours to figure out the mistake, and that was after going through the guideline on how to create a minimal working example.

Thanks again Stefan.