Reporting a LaTeX bug

The LaTeX team supports LaTeX, and will deal with bona fide bug reports. Note that the LaTeX team does not deal with contributed packages — just the software that is part of the LaTeX distribution itself: LaTeX and the “required” packages. Furthermore, 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

2. Has your bug already been reported? Browse the current LaTeX issues database and the older LaTeX GNATS 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 runs it in a clean directory, on a system with no contributed packages, it should replicate your problem. See the LaTeX team guidelines for more advice.

4. Run your test file through LaTeX: the bug report should include the .log file that this process creates.

5. Log an issue in the GitHub tracker

FAQ ID: Q-latexbug
Last updated: 2018-05-23