Outputs a largely empty file

[mashaalmemon]

Hi There,

I am running a latex file through opendetex but getting a largely empty file as a result (I saw largely because it seems to have newlines in it but that is all).

I am running it on Max OSX with opendetex installed via homebrew. Appears to have installed v2.8.1.

Running the simple plain vanilla command like so:

detex input_astronomy_3.tex > input_astronomy_3.txt

Input file and resultant output files attached. Any help with this would be much appreciated.

input_astronomy_3.tex.zip input_astronomy_3.txt

[mashaalmemon]

Note I also tried installing from the source in this repo. Having exactly the same result.

[williardx]

Also experiencing the same problem on Mac OS X.

[diego898]

any update on this?

[JoostHuizinga]

I can confirm that a latex file that includes any instances of \usepackage or \newcommand (and probably all recognized commands) in the preamble will cause a mostly empty file to be written. Uncommented text that occurs before the \usepackage or \newcommand statements will be printed, but everything after it will not.

This occurs on Mac OS X 10.12.6 with Apple LLVM version 9.0.0. I installed opendetex by cloning revision 08b045a1feea91d132bf3b228ba9ade969726f88 and calling make.

[JoostHuizinga]

Some more experimentation reveals that the error only seems to occur when there are one or more characters (including spaces and tabs!) after the first argument of \usepackage or \newcommand.

Thus, this works (provided there are no spaces after the last bracket):

\usepackage{babel}

But this does not:

\usepackage{babel}%

Also, this works:

\newcommand{\test}
{test}

But this does not:

\newcommand{\test}{test}

[JoostHuizinga]

After even more experimentation, I suspect that lex isn't properly handling the following in detex.l: <LaMacro>"}""\n"{0,1}. I think this line is supposed to indicate that a Latex macro ends with brace, some amount of whitespace, and then a newline. However, lex seems to be interpreting it as a brace, immediately followed by a new line. Hence, if there is any character after the brace, the latex macro is never finished according to lex and, as a result, all content in the document is ignored.

However, flex does seem to work.

So, if you have this issue, you could try the following:

• Open the Makefile and look for the following:

  # Use your favorite lexical scanner
  #
  LEX = lex
  #LEX = flex

• Then change it to:

  # Use your favorite lexical scanner
  #
  #LEX = lex
  LEX = flex

• Now, in a terminal, navigate to your detex installation and type:

  make clean
  make

  And it might just work from there. At the very least, this worked for me.

[pkubowicz]

Should be fixed when 2.8.3 is released.