after updating my tex system with the Tex Live utility on osx mojave, characters from textcomp disappeared. I had to trash /usr/local/texlive/2019basic/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/textcomp.sty and rename the weirdly named textcomp-2018-08-11.sty that was sitting next to it into textcomp.sty . Now everything is back to normal. Any idea of what's going on here ?
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/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/textcomp-2018-08-11.sty
is a core part of the base latex release and should not be renamed.
As explained in LaTeX News 31 (texdoc ltnews or https://www.latex-project.org/news/latex2e-news/ltnews31.pdf) the functionality of textcomp is now essentially always available and you do not need to load the package in most cases.
There are some cases, especially for debugging, where the [error] or warn package options are still useful so textcomp.sty is still in the distribution, and if you absolutely need the original code then that may be loaded via the package rollback syntax
\usepackage{textcomp}[=2018/08/11]
which will in turn load the file textcomp-2018-08-11.sty
It may be that your document has an incompatibility with the latest release, perhaps using the above form may be a workaround, but without seeing an example document that shows the problem it is impossible to say. Renaming the file will make your installation incompatible with standard LaTeX and is strongly to be discouraged.
To see the rollback in action try
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{textcomp}[=2018/08/11]
\begin{document}
\end{document}
which should show a terminal output as below, showing the rollback to the 2018 version of textcomp
LaTeX2e <2020-02-02>
L3 programming layer <2020-01-31>
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2019/12/20 v1.4l Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/textcomp.sty
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/textcomp-2018-08-11.sty
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/ts1enc.def)))
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-pdfmode.def)
David Carlisle
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I use MacTeX-Basic and Tex utility app to load missing packages. Sorry to the purists for the sloppy solution (i was getting mad). For what it's worth, i re-updated this morning and i now have the latest textcomp which incidentally points at the 2018 one. The following code works but if i comment the package loading i get "Undefined control sequence" (here's the log file https://www.dropbox.com/s/l7kbofpftcblg0r/essai.log?dl=0)
\documentclass[12pt]{article} \usepackage{textcomp}[=2018/08/11] \begin{document} I like to type \textonehalf \end{document}
– Nicolas Boccard Feb 08 '20 at 11:43 -
@NicolasBoccard your tex installation is rather messed up and inconsistent. textcomp was included in the format in LaTeX2e 2020-02-02 so if you have an older format and do not load the package the undefined errors are expected. If you have an up to date texlive 2019 then this will work but your format is
LaTeX2e <2018-12-01>so not only have you not got the 2020-02-02 format you have missed both the 2019 releases as well and have a format built from the 2018 sources. – David Carlisle Feb 08 '20 at 12:50
textcomp.styis -- as of today -- dated2020/02/02 v2.0m. Version2018-08-11would seem waaaaay out of date. – Mico Feb 06 '20 at 19:25zzz-somedate.styare part of the rollback mechanism to implement the option to access previous versions. – David Carlisle Feb 06 '20 at 23:29kpsewhich textcomp-2018-08-11.styit's a rollback implementation – David Carlisle Feb 06 '20 at 23:30