[texhax] inexplicable LaTeX weirdness

[Robin Fairbairns]

> > > I am a relatively new user. I successfully created a paper using
> > > OzTeX and was working on a second paper  last Friday. I had compiled
> > > about half of it. Monday morning I opened the second paper and was
> > > working on it. When I tried to TeX I got Unreadable Control Sequence
> > > documentclass{article}. When I tried the first paper, I got the
> > > same. When I tried any document, I got the same.
> > > I'm using OS 9 on a G4. My son installed some games over the
> > > weekend - could some extensions be turned off?
> 
> Doesn't seem to be anyhing to with extensions since TeX did run.
> 
> > You've switched from using the LaTeX format to (Plain) TeX.
> 
> I hate to differ but I think not; the error in theat case would read
> 
> ! Undefined Control Sequence
> l.1 \documentclass
>                   {article}

oh, come one -- this is a new user: i really don't believe that he's
not simply mis-remembered the error message when sending his mail.

> I suspect, since it says instead "Unreadable", that somehow your editor or a
> file-corrupting crash (or, oops, a virus) has inserted ascii control
> characters into your file (possibly as the first character), neither TeX nor
> LaTeX (nor any other flavour of TeX) lkes them.

it's quite possible that oztex has an "unreadable" in one of its error
messages (who can tell, since the sources are of course not public),
but there's no tex error message that contains "unreadable" -- the
only instances of the word in tex.web are in comments.

robin