Hi all, Memoir.
Slowly I turn, step by step, inch by inch. Memoir. Never again! As you know I switched to Ubuntu and of course things are different. But for the most part, my books whose document classes were based on "book" fired up just fine once I fixed the layout location (and of course once I got a LyX that stayed running more than 20 seconds :-) But "Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting is built with a document class based on Memoir, and it's nothing but trouble. First I had to get Memoir from the web because the Ubuntu one didn't seem to work. Now I need memhfixc or my book gets the "zero output" error. The memhfixc and memoir documentations say memhfixc is included in memoir, but I sure couldn't find it. Yeah, I finally realized I had to run latex mempatch.ins, but it all took time and it was all a hassle. I had to take apart the book til I got a small file to reproduce the problem, narrowed it down to memhfixc, and then had to figure out how to fix it. For all I know, there will be yet other problems when I put back the original layout file and the original document. Worse, this isn't the first time. Every time I lay down a new OS, my memoir derived book fails. All my book derived books work marvelously. If I get time, I'm going to rework "Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting" to use a book derived document class. I'm not saying Memoir doesn't have its place. The person who uses Memoir for every book and is intimately familiar with its idiocyncracies will have little trouble with it. But that's not me. One thing's for sure -- I'll never use Memoir for a new book again. SteveT
