MiKTeX 2.6 Known Issues

This page lists the biggest stumbling blocks you may come across when you install and use MiKTeX 2.6.

LaTeX produces PDF (not DVI)

If you experience that

latex foo

produces foo.pdf (instead of foo.dvi), then you should check your preamble code. For example, the following code does not work as expected because the primitive \pdfoutput is always defined:

\newif\ifpdf% 
        \ifx\pdfoutput\undefined% 
\pdffalse% 
\else% 
        \pdfoutput=1% 
        \pdftrue% 
\fi%

Instead of the above code, you should use the ifpdf package:

\usepackage{ifpdf}

This package provides a working \ifpdf macro.

ConTeXt doesn't work

Symptom: texexec --version outputs nothing.

ConTeXt scripts are written in Perl and Ruby. In order to make use of ConTeXt, you must install both language interpreters.

Unknown archive file type

You will see the error message

Unknown archive file type

when you try to install an LZMA compressed package archive file with an old version of the package manager. In this case, you have to install new MiKTeX binaries:

  1. start MiKTeX Update
  2. select the miktex-bin package only
  3. complete the update procedure
  4. start MiKTeX Update again
  5. select all bin packages
  6. complete the update procedure