General troubleshooting

There may be situations where we cannot solve a problem simply by reading and acting on warnings or error messages. Imagine a mysterious error, an untraceable error location, irresolvable references, or just unclear messages from classes or packages.

Locating the cause by the line number printed out by LaTeX, or by knowing what we've done since the previous typesetting run, usually helps. Once we've found a problematic line or chunk, we can remove or fix it. Otherwise, it might become difficult.

Here are the first general steps we can work through:

• Compile several times. This may be necessary for correct referencing, positioning of floating figures, creating a table of contents, bibliographies, and lists of tables and figures.
• Check the order in which you load the packages. Some packages, such as hyperref, don't work well if loaded before or after specific packages. You may just swap some lines to correct or test that.
• Remove...