Reporting Problems with Texifier

If you are receiving this link from us, then most likely you’ve reported an issue in Texifier that we are unable to reproduce. This is a brief explanation of how we fix issues and how you can help us speed up the process. The responsibility to fix any flaws in Texifier is of course ours, we are writing this to record the actions a user can take when reporting an issue to minimise the time until it is fixed.

Why we need a user’s help to fix Texifier

When we receive a report we

  • Correspond with the user through our support portal to find out what the issue is and how we can reproduce it.
  • Follow their steps on our computers until we can reproduce the issue.
  • Attach developer tools to Texifier whilst reproducing the issue so we can observe the precise cause.
  • Fix the issue.
  • Add a test to our test suite. Every night we run all test on all operating systems and devices we support, and check the results each day. This ensures that if the issue ever recurs we know about it well before it would be released to users or beta testers.
  • Periodically we collect together a number of fixes and push to the beta branch. This provides a real world test that the issues have been fixed properly, and no new issues have been introduced.
  • Once the beta has been running for a few weeks with no reported issues, we roll the new version of Texifier out to all users. We do this progressively, selecting a random batch of users each day until it has rolled out across the entire userbase. We do it like this so that in the unlikely chance a new issue has escaped all prior testing we can pause the rollout and fix it before it reaches all users.

For almost all issues in Texifier, the majority of the time spent is in the first two steps. It is rare that it takes time to fix an issue once we can reproduce it, so if you are able to report an issue in a way that enables us to reproduce it immediately, we can almost always get a fix to you quickly.

What to include in an issue report

In order to minimise the number of emails that go back and forth between us and you delaying the fix, we’ve noted the most common details we ask users. In any issue report please send

  • The version of Texifier you are using and where you bought it from It is very common that we have to email back to find out if a report corresponds to Texifier macOS or Texifier iOS.
  • The version of macOS/iOS/Windows you are using Please be sure to let us know if you are using a beta version of that operating system. Please also let us know if you have made any nonstandard modifications.
  • A document with which you can reproduce the issue The LaTeX ecosystem is very diverse, and even if an issue is occurring with all your documents, it is usually due to some common factor in your documents. We understand that this is not always possible for unpublished or confidential work. In those cases, if you can redact sensitive information and still trigger the issue please send that. Please however be sure that you are sending complete documents. We are unable to guess accurately at what else might be needed to produce an issue, and we almost always have to email back to ask for a complete document, further delaying the fix.
  • A description of what you are doing ideally in sufficient detail that we can follow it and reproduce the problem
  • The Texifier error log Texifier will log any unusual occurrences to this, and it is often helpful for us. There are instructions at apps/troubleshooting/error-log on how to retrieve it. It is plain text so you can read it before sending it to us if you have privacy concerns.

As well as the details above, depending on the class of problem, some specific details are also useful

  • If Texifier is crashing A crash report tells us exactly where it crashed. There are notes at apps/troubleshooting/crash-reports .
  • If Texifier is hanging A spin dump tells us where Texifier is hung, there are notes on how to collect one at apps/troubleshooting/spindump .
  • If Texifier is working, but doing so very slowly, or using large amounts of RAM A spin dump tells us what Texifier is doing during an interval of time, there are notes on how to collect one at apps/troubleshooting/spindump .
  • If Texifier keeps running, but behaves incorrectly Often in these case a screenshot of the problem situation will avoid the need for us to email back with more questions, or even a better a screencast means we can follow the video on our side and this almost always allows us to reproduce the problem first time. There are notes on how to get a screencast at apps/troubleshooting/screencast .