Latex: no line here to end
I use LaTeX to write my thesis in. Like C, it’s user friendly, but picky about who its friends are.
Recently, I’ve been fighting with LaTeX over using the pdftex processor but only while at uni. It worked at home, but not at uni. At uni, to produce PDFs from LaTeX I had to go through the dvips processor. Normally this was not a problem, however, pdftex has the lovely property of being able to insert .jpeg, .png and other graphics formats as pictures, rather than the limited support that dvips offers for .eps graphics files only. When I tried to use pdftex at uni, it would fail with:
! LaTeX Error: There’s no line here to end.
I had put the fact that I could only make pdftex work at home down to some weirdness in the installation of my LaTeX implemention here at uni. However, I was able, recently, to use pdftex to compile a file that was on my flashdrive but I was unable to compile a file that was on my networked drive. Why? Why? Why?
After a small amount of banging my head against the wall, the solution became apparent.
Googling for that error message let me to the TeXFAQ for no line here to end which told me that the error:
comes in reaction to you giving LaTeX a \\ command at a time when it’s not expecting it.
I wasn’t giving any \\ commands as far as I knew! I was at the point of creating LaTeX files of the “Hello World” sort before the penny dropped.
The networked drive I use is (obviously) mapped to a drive letter. It’s also mapped to “My Documents”. I was opening the file from “My Documents”. Apparently, “My Documents” is a convenient fiction that all programs see as a full path. In windows, the path to a mapped drive is “\\name\of\server\to\users\path”. Notice the (un)helpful “\\” at the beginning of that path?
Solution? Open the file from the pseudo-name given to the mapped drive, that is “h:”.
Arrrgh!
