Compilation problems

I offer suggestions for what to do in case you have difficulty getting usable output from the tar.gz versions of my book MEASURE THEORY. I have been unable to download a working TeX installation on either Windows or Mac OS, so the notes below refer only to Linux. I should welcome instructions on how to get one of the other systems to work.

Basics

You need to download the appropriate gzipped tar file mtx.20xx/mtx.20xx.tar.gz from my website https://www.essex.ac.uk/maths/people/fremlin , uncompress it and extract the component files. In Linux systems this can usually be done with the commands 
         gunzip mtx.20xx.tar.gz
         tar -xf mtx.20xx.tar
which will create a directory mtx.20xx containing the files you need. One or more of them will be of the form volx.tex; now the Linux commands 
         tex volx.tex
         dvipdf volx.dvi volx.pdf
will create a PDF file volx.pdf which you can read onscreen or print. I find that this works on a variety of Linux installations from 2.6.13-19 to 3.13.0-79.

The commonest error

is to try to compile with 
         latex volx.tex
which will produce an error message along the lines of 
         ! Undefined control sequence.
         l.479 \buffer@\fontdimen13 \tenex
when the LaTeX compiler encounters a line which makes no sense to it.

A problem with dvipdf

I find that some recent TeX installations on Linux fail to compile my regular files correctly, due to a change in the expected presentation of embedded Postscript files. (From what I can make out, the change is in the file /usr/bin/dvips .) Even if tex volx.tex seems to run without problems, dvipdf volx.dvi volx.pdf can give an error message starting 
         Error: /undefined in startTexFig
Provided you have not only TeX but also LaTeX installed, you may be able to fix this by
  • 1. Downloading volwp.2016.aux.txt and miniltx.tex
  • 2. Changing the name of the file volwp.2016.aux.txt to volwp.2016.aux
  • 3. Changing the line 
            \input volwp.aux
    in volx.tex to 
            \input volwp.2016.aux
    and trying again with tex volx.tex . This works for me on Linux 4.4.0-18.

    In case of further difficulty

    contact fremdh@essex.ac.uk.

    Back to main Measure Theory page.

    19.5.16