Compiling TeX on the DECstation

[Dan Barrett]

	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

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| Dan Barrett     -      Systems Administrator, Computer Science Department |
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