barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) (08/24/90)
In a previous comp.text.tex article entitled "Where did my math symbols go??", I complained of the mysterious behavior of TeX on our DECsystem 5400 running Ultrix 4.0. THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED. If you plan on installing TeX on a similar system, please read this! If you are compiling UNIX TeX 2.95 (or perhaps other version) on a DECstation or DECsystem running Ultrix 4.0, using "cc"... DO NOT USE THE OPTIMIZER!!! (-O) NUMEROUS mysterious problems were caused by use of the optimizer. I cannot say whether the optimizer or TeX is at fault, but I do know that TeX runs just fine on the DECstation without optimization. Some problems were: o Math font information did not get included in the DVI file. Therefore, no math symbols showed up. o LaTeX tabular environments do not generate anything in the DVI file -- tables are totally missing. o LaTeX complains that it is out of space, and that you need to make "Big TeX", even when the document is not that large or complex. o LaTeX complains about certain constructs that should work, like using a footnote inside a \chapter heading. All of these problems stopped happening when I compiled without optimization. They were DEFINITELY introduced by the optimized virtex program itself, and not the input files, tfm files, or pk files. (Proof: the DVI files were actually missing references to fonts like "cmsy10" that should have been there, and I used the exact set of input and tfm files that worked perfectly on another machine. More proof on request.) Hey DEC!! Why did you set "make" to turn on optimization by default??? BAD IDEA! Dan //////////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ | Dan Barrett - Systems Administrator, Computer Science Department | | The Johns Hopkins University, 34th and Charles Sts., Baltimore, MD 21218 | | INTERNET: barrett@cs.jhu.edu | | | COMPUSERVE: >internet:barrett@cs.jhu.edu | UUCP: barrett@jhunix.UUCP | \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/////////////////////////////////////