Document Classes ⇒ Having trouble with beamer class

[StatSig]

Apologies for any breaches of etiquette, including possibly posting this in the wrong section of the forums; I read the posting guidelines and this is my best guess as where to put this issue. I ran a search for this issue, but may have missed it if it's old hat.

Okay, disclaimers aside: I use the 'beamer' document class/package occasionally for presentations, and the last time I did so (6-8 months ago), it worked fine. I updated it just last night and am working on a new presentation and have hit a really annoying snag in a set of errors and weird output.

I'm running a very basic test document just to show the issue;

Code: Select all

\documentclass{beamer}
\title{Test}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}

I am running MikTeX 2.7 and using TeXnicCenter for coding, if these facts are relevant.

When compiled, I get a set of 15 errors and 4 warnings. The errors are pretty much all variations on the following:

! Undefined control sequence
1.17 \pgfdeclareimage
[ width=14pt,height=12pt ]{beamericonbook}{beamericonbook}

! LaTeX error: Missing \begin{document}.

Most of the errors are regarding \pgfdeclareimage and \pgfaliasimage

The warnings are one warning that pgf is obsolete and no longer needed on input line 13, a hyperref warning that option 'pdfpagelabels' is turned off, a font warning that Font shape 'OT1/cmss/m/n' in size <4> is not available, and something about size substitutions. There's also some bad boxes listed.

If it were just a bunch of errors with no output problems, I'd just ignore it, but as it is the first slide of my presentation prints out to be a whole bunch of lines of code about beamericonbook, like 'beamericonbook.!20opaquebeamericonbookshaded' and over and over again with different number values. Also some width/height declarations thrown in. Subsequent slides are fine, but the title slide is all mucked up.

I'm sorry if this is a silly and basic issue: I do my best with computers but find myself often hopelessly lost when it comes to troubleshooting, and I've had nothing but trouble trying to get LaTeX to do anything beyond make my equations. Any help you could give would be wonderful.

[localghost]

Update also the pgf/tikZ package with the MiKTeX package manager.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten¹

[gmedina]

Hi StatSig,

in addition to the suggestion that localghost gave you, the advise given by Stefan_K here (How to get rid of those beamer warnings) can help you to get rid of some of the warnings.

[StatSig]

Thank you both for your responses. Unfortunately, I uninstalled and reinstalled pgf and xcolor using the MikTeX package updater last night before posting--I forgot to mention that--and the errors are continuing. Thank you for the advice on getting rid of the warnings, however, that was helpful!

[localghost]

The cause could be that image inclusion with beamer and pgf/tikZ respectively has changed in the current versions. Refer to the manuals.

[gmedina]

Compile the simple test code that you posted in the opening post, and attach here the .log file obtained.

[StatSig]

localghost and gmedina (btw, gmedina, love the Fibonacci sig):

Thanks for your help. I was about to attach the .log as gmedina suggested, and then browsed through it myself and found a spot partway through that alerted me to what was going wrong. Pgf was being read from two different places! One was the newest version through MikTeX, but I had, earlier, downloaded manually a version that I guess was an older one and put it in my Local TeX Files folder, which was added as a root directory to MikTeX. So I guess it got confused about the two different versions of pgf and the older one was causing problems.

So thanks for your help, I appreciate it! I doubt I would've checked the .log this closely if you hadn't suggested. Thanks!

[mbecker]

Hello, I am new to this list and joined because I am having the same problem posted by StatSig, but after following all of your suggestions I'm still having the problem. I am using TeXShop with MacOS 10.5. I've tried reinstalling Beamer 3.07; I reinstalled pgf2.0; I added the [hyperref={pdfpagelabels=false}] text at the beginning of my file; I created the file pgfbaseimage.sty inside my texmf directory.

My .tex file looks like this:

\documentclass[hyperref={pdfpagelabels=false}]{beamer}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Test
\end{frame}
\end{document}

I'm attaching my log file just in case. I should maybe also point out that I've used Beamer successfully for the past few years and only discovered this problem after upgrading from OS 10.4. Has anyone else found problems with 10.5? (compiling other latex documents with 10.5 hasn't been a problem.)

[gmedina]

Hi mbecker,

I did some tests, and your code works OK in different LaTeX distributions (TeX Live2007, TeX Live2008, MiKTeX 2.7) and platforms (Debian Lenny, Ubuntu 8.04, WindowsXP) (disclaimer: not Mac, since I don't use it). I took a quick look to the log file you attached and some lines caught my attention, for example:

(/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.gwtex/tex/latex/beamer/beamerbasethemes.sty
Package: beamerbasethemes 2004/10/07 (rcs-revision 1.9)
)

This suggests that you are using teTeX which is by now an obsolete LaTeX distribution (information in this other thread). So, it seems to me, that you upgraded your OS but your system is still using a, by now, obsolete and non-supported LaTeX distro.

Again, I'm not a Mac user... but my advise is to get rid of teTeX and replace it with the appropriate up-to-date LaTeX distribution for Mac.

[mbecker]

Hi gmedina,

Thanks for your suggestion and noticing the teTeX reference in the log file! I found that directory but couldn't figure out how to delete it (when I tried rmdir teTeX/ it said "permission denied" and I am NOT very UNIX savvy!), but when I moved both my Beamer/ directory and the pgf2.00/ directory into a further embedded directory within texmf/ it now seems to work fine, so I guess it can't see teTeX from there. (I had installed the latest TeXshop distribution but I guess that didn't delete the old teTeX?) Anyway, it seems to be working now. Thanks again, and sorry for taking a while to respond.