LaTeX will not work anymore

Question

My LaTeX was compiling perfectly a minute ago. I wrote some more, added in a citation - now it won't read any of my citations, and is giving me error messages and not allowing me to make a document which I need for a test. It repeats this:

[1
Non-PDF special ignored!{C:/Users/riley/AppData/Local/MiKTeX/2.9/pdftex/config/
pdftex.map}] [2] [3] [4]

! LaTeX Error: There's no line here to end.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.138 5
       \\
?

Welcome, ou probably have \\ where it is not ok. Which is almost everywhere except tabular material. — Johannes_B, Oct 22 '16 at 16:11
Apart from that hint, nobody can answer your question without a minimal working example. — Johannes_B, Oct 22 '16 at 16:11
if everything is in one file: check line 138 and above for a rogue \\ — naphaneal, Oct 22 '16 at 16:19
Debugging tip. Put the command \end{document} halfway thru your source code. Now attempt compile. If it succeeds then your error is after that point, else before. Then move the \end{document} to the middle of the half where the error is and compile again. This is a simple binary search. — R. Schumacher, Oct 22 '16 at 16:21

Heiko Oberdiek · Answer 1 · 2016-10-22T16:30:12.257

The error There's no line here to end is thrown, if \linebreak, \nolinebreak, \newline, or \\\\ is called in vertical mode. The error message shows \\\\ and a line number. Thus, you can go to the source code and check, why \\\\ is called in vertical mode.

There seems to be a 5 at the begin of line. It's unclear, why it is not set in horizontal mode. Maybe, it is consumed as macro of a previous command or whatever, the previous line would be nice to see. Also, 5 maybe a typo for a non-working shift key and a comment character % was the intention to put \\\\ into a comment.

Also, driver options should be checked. The console snippet shows:

Non-PDF special ignored!

Usually this is caused by wrong driver settings. For example, specifying dvips to a driver-dependent package, but using pdflatex to compile.

LaTeX will not work anymore

1 Answers1