Errors can be reported either from the LATEX phase (in which case it is reported as such) or the lower level TEX phase. Don't be too put off by the half-digested text displayed. A line number is reported which usually helps to detect the error. Typing `h' sometimes produces helpful diagnostics. The most common errors reported are
\usepackage{...}
lines.
Overfull \hbox (15.42563pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 285--288 \OT1/ppl/m/n/10 You can cre-ate ver-tical space between lines or ho-ri-zontal space betweenmeans that lines 285 to 288 are producing a text line about 15 pts (about 5mm) too wide.
\OT1/ppl/m/n/10
is the specification of the
font used. When TEX does right and left alignment, it works out
how much space it needs to leave between words and where to hypenate words if
necessary. But the amount of space it's prepared to leave has to fall within a
certain range and it will only split words in certain places (shown in the
error message by a hyphen). If these restrictions mean that
LATEX can't produce a satisfactory
line, it will produce as much of the line as it can. A re-phrasing of the
offending sentence will usually solve the problem. Another thing you might try
is to control the way a troublesome word is hyphenated using something like \hypenation{furthermore fur-ther-more}at the top of your file. If all else fails, use
{\sloppy...}
to enclose the offending text.
*
.
This means LATEX needs more input.
It probably means you've missed out an \end{document}
, but if not
you may be able to get LATEX to
continue processing as best it can by typing <Return>
.
! Argument of \label has an extra }
If you're sure you haven't left out a left brace, then maybe you need to
protect the inmost (fragile) command. For example, in some older
versions of LATEX \label
is fragile which causes a problem in
\caption{Picture\label{margin}}
, so the safer construction
\caption{Picture\protect\label{margin}}
has to be used.