Reporting a LaTeX bug

The LaTeX team supports LaTeX, and will deal with bona fide bug reports. However, you need to be slightly careful to produce a bug report that is usable by the team. The steps are:

1. Are you still using current LaTeX? Maintenance is only available for sufficiently up-to-date versions of LaTeX - if your LaTeX is more than two versions out of date, the bug reporting mechanisms will reject your report.

2. Has your bug already been reported? Browse the LaTeX bugs database, to find any earlier instance of your bug. In many cases, the database will list a work-around.

3. Prepare a "minimum" file that exhibits the problem. Ideally, such a file should contain no contributed packages - the LaTeX team as a whole takes no responsibility for such packages (if they're supported at all, they're supported by their authors). The "minimum" file should be self-sufficient: if a member of the team should run it in a clean directory, on a system with no contributed packages, it should replicate your problem.

4. Run your file through LaTeX: the bug system needs the .log file that this process creates.

You now have two possible ways to proceed: either create a mail report to send to the bug processing mechanism (5, below), or submit your bug report via the web (7, below).

5. Process the bug-report creation file, using LaTeX itself: 

  latex latexbug
latexbug asks you some questions, and then lets you describe the bug you've found. It produces an output file latexbug.msg, which includes the details you've supplied, your "minimum" example file, and the log file you got after running the example. (I always need to edit the result before submitting it: typing text into latexbug isn't much fun.)

6. Mail the resulting file to latex-bugs@latex-project.org; the subject line of your email should be the same as the bug title you gave to latexbug. The file latexbug.msg should be included into your message in-line: attachments are likely to be rejected by the bug processor.

7. Connect to the latex bugs processing web page and enter details of your bug - category, summary and full description, and the two important files (source and log file); note that members of the LaTeX team need your name and email address, as they may need to discuss the bug with you, or to advise you of a work-around.

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=latexbug