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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label latexbug</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Reporting a LaTeX bug</h3>
<p>The LaTeX team supports LaTeX, and will deal with

<em>bona fide</em> bug reports.  Note that the LaTeX team does
<em>not</em> deal with contributed packages &mdash; just the software that
is part of the LaTeX distribution itself: LaTeX and the
&ldquo;required&rdquo; packages.
Furthermore, you need to be slightly
careful to produce a bug report that is usable by the team.  The steps
are:
<p><b>1.</b> Are you still using current LaTeX?  Maintenance is only
available for sufficiently up-to-date versions of LaTeX &mdash; if your
LaTeX is more than two versions out of date, the bug reporting
mechanisms may reject your report.
<p><b>2.</b> Has your bug already been reported?  Browse the

<a href="http://www.latex-project.org/cgi-bin/ltxbugs2html?introduction=yes">LaTeX bugs database</a>,
to find any earlier instance of your bug.  In many cases, the database
will list a work-around.
<p><b>3.</b> Prepare a 
<a href="FAQ-minxampl.html">&ldquo;minimum&rdquo; file</a> that exhibits the problem.
Ideally, such a file should contain no contributed packages &mdash; the
LaTeX team as a whole takes no responsibility for such packages (if
they&rsquo;re supported at all, they&rsquo;re supported by their authors).  The
&ldquo;minimum&rdquo; 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.
<p><b>4.</b> Run your file through LaTeX: the bug
system needs the <code>.log</code> file that this process creates.
<p>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).
<p><b>5.</b> Process the bug-report creation file, using LaTeX itself:
<pre>
  latex latexbug
</pre>
<i>latexbug</i> asks you some questions, and then lets you describe
the bug you&rsquo;ve found.  It produces an output file <i>latexbug.msg</i>,
which includes the details you&rsquo;ve supplied, your &ldquo;minimum&rdquo; 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
<i>latexbug</i> isn&rsquo;t much fun.)
<p><b>6.</b> Mail the resulting file to
<i>latex-bugs@latex-project.org</i>; the subject line of your email
should be the same as the bug title you gave to <i>latexbug</i>.  The
file <i>latexbug.msg</i> should be included into your message in-line:
attachments are likely to be rejected by the bug processor.
<p><b>7.</b> Connect to the

<a href="http://www.latex-project.org/bugs-upload.html">latex bugs processing web page</a>
and enter details of your bug &mdash; category, summary and full
description, and the two important files (source and log file); note
that members of the LaTeX team <em>need</em> your name and email address, as
they may need to discuss the bug with you, or to advise you of a
work-around.
<p>
<p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=latexbug">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=latexbug</a>
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