Canonical TeXnicCenter question?

Question

Update 13-03-02: This question just earned its OP a Famous Question badge for 10k views.

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I just voted to close In TeXnicCenter I'm trying to produce a PDF but no output is being created, but then I noticed it has a whooping 3k views, which seems to make it the most popular texniccenter question. I suppose this is because of its unbearably generic, but oft-googled title.

The asker of this question isn't registered and hasn't returned for almost a year, so I think we can consider this question abandoned and conquer it: I propose to turn this question CW and make it into a canonical "TeXnicCenter doesn't work, help me" question, catching the most common problems related to output profiles, compiling and working with Adobe Reader X. So let's:

1. make question CW
2. probably keep the title, but perhaps generalize the question body a bit
3. jointly write one CW answer subdivided in the most common problem scenarios and linking to other, more specific questions on tex.sx. Drafting could be done in an answer to this question here?

This wouldn't only help solving problems that many people have, but also attract a lot of users to tex.sx and show them the high quality we usually have here.

I myself don't have the time at the moment, so it'd be great if somebody could give this little project a shot! (Unless this isn't such a great idea after all.)

Answer 1

I think this is not a bad idea per se. There are quite a few TeXnicCenter tutorials available on different websites and blogs, many of them using outdated versions of TeXnicCenter and Adobe Acrobat.

What is hard is to guess all the possible problems, as the combination of TeXnicCenter, MiKTeX, pdflatex or luatex, bibtex, makeindex and Adobe Acrobat as the viewer is inherently brittle. A single misplaced " or a wrong path can cause problems that are hard to detect or diagnose for a beginner.

Instead of anticipating the problems it might be easier to explain the steps to reach a working setup, with 'checkpoints' using a MWE. This would start by the download and installation of the current 2.0 Alpha 4 version, which is despite its name working better than the older 1.0 release candidate. Additionally just switching to a different PDF reader, e.g. Sumatra PDF, can often help as it is not locking the file and automatically reloads new versions without necessarily being told to do so by the editor.

This might be one approach to create a canonical question for TeXnicCenter, as a clean reinstallation leads in my experience to a working setup much faster than trying to diagnose specific issues.