Garbage is displayed on a separate page instead of a picture or table

[Evgeny Kurbatov]

Hello, guys.

When the text becomes long enough and there are sections, figures, and tables of the half-page height, then the last figure or table may disappear. A separate page appears instead, containing a few garbage symbols like `,ы,' and nothing else.

This bug is reproducible on my text in a latex-latex-bibtex-latex chain, as well as in a pdflatex-... chain. The problem arises at the last stage, at the very last latex/pdflatex, after the `bbl' is generated, and `aux' is updated.

If to add a few paragraphs of some Lorem ipsum somewhere in the text, to any place, then the problem disappears. It looks like the compiler can't handle placing large figures and tables on the pages.

I cannot show the bug with a short example, although I'll try again.
Unfortinately, I can't provide you the text that I'm currently working on, since this is an unpublished article.

In sum, I can list some of the factors that contribute to the bug:
1. At least two figures and/or tables. They should not be too small.
2. Presence of the bibliography, either inline or as '.bbl'.
3. A situation where the compiler must decide, where to break the page or not.

This never happened on Debian 10, and on any [stable] Ubuntu <20.04.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: texlive-latex-base 2019.20200218-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-48.52-generic 5.4.60
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-48-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.8
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Oct 16 11:06:08 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-06-16 (121 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Release amd64 (20200423)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: texlive-base
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Evgeny Kurbatov (evgenykurbatov)]

I have made a minimal working example of the bug. See attach.
It's working with just a single `pdflatex paper'.
As seen, it crashes on the paper break.

[Evgeny Kurbatov (evgenykurbatov)]

Sorry, I tried to reattach the example and deleted it. Here it is, again.

[Norbert Preining (preining)]

I cannot reproduce this behavior with current Debian packages. I get the table properly laid out and new erroneous code on the last page. I also tried my installation of TeX Live 2019 and also there I didn't have any problems.

The version of TL2019 I have is sligthly newer than what is in Ubuntu:

-LaTeX2e <2020-02-02> patch level 2
+LaTeX2e <2020-02-02> patch level 5

-Package: babel 2020/02/14 3.40 The Babel package
+Package: babel 2020/02/28 3.41 The Babel package

My guess is that the problem is with LaTeX patch level, it took a bit until all the bugs were fixed in the LaTeX release.

[Evgeny Kurbatov (evgenykurbatov)]

Hi, Norbert. Thank you for testing.
Should I tweak a maintainer of the texlive-latex-base package to implement the latest patches or just wait for Ubuntu 20.10 to use its repo (which is dirty)?