What do the square brackets in LaTeX magazines mean?

Question

I am currently working on a parser that reads full LaTeX magazines. Most magazine formats, although strange, are easy to understand, but these square brackets puzzle me. Here is an example from the end of one of my magazines:

Overfull \hbox (10.88788pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 40--40 []$[]$ [] [102]) [103] Kapitel 14. (./Thermo-141-GrenzenFundamentalpostulat.tex [104 ]) (./Thermo-142-Mastergleichung.tex [105]) (./Thermo-143-HTheorem.tex [106pdfTeX warning (ext4): destination with the same identifier (name{equation.14.3.3}) ha s been already used, duplicate ignored 

Can someone give me a clue what these square brackets mean? I do not see any structure in them.

I have a suspicion that the lines 2/3 above is some kind of ASCII art representing the window layout, although I know too little about badboxes to justify this or determine the meaning of single characters.

Then “[104”, etc., seems to correspond to page numbers, but I still don’t see the reason why sometimes something appears between the square brackets (for example, the pdfTeX warning above), and sometimes not.

Answer 1

As said in the comments []$[]$ , means that Tex wants to tell you that something is taking up too much horizontal space ( Overfull \hbox ). He tries to print offensive fields, but fails, because they seem to be formulas that cannot be printed in plain text. If the same error occurred with plain text, you will get this text inside the square brackets as a hint where Tex thinks it can break your text.

As for the numbers inside the square brackets, these are the page numbers. In your example, Tex got your text up to page 102, where it had problems with a too wide formula.

For more information on reading Tex log files, try the following website .