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I am trying to use Macvim combined with the Vimlatex package. It seems that when I use the amsart article class combined with the parskip package gives me an error. When I use TexShop for example, the document compiles without any errors. I also compiled the document using the terminal, once again no problems. It only occurs when I compile my .tex document using the ,ll command from within vim. Here is the error message I get:

**Error Message**:/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/tex/latex/parskip/parskip.sty|| LaTeX Warning: Command \@starttoc  has changed. Check if current package is valid.

I am using Macvim 7.4 on Max OS X, Mavericks, if that's important. Macvim automatically takes me to the parskip.sty as well and I can't even get back to my original editing session. This is so frustrating. I am fairly new to Vim btw :)

Can anybody help me with this?

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    You can't use parskip with amsart unless you avoid using \tableofcontents, \listoffigures and \listoftables: the package redefines \@starttoc in a way that doesn't please amsart. If you don't use those commands, there should be no problem. But don't use parskip: the normal paragraph indentation has revealed a good typographic device for several centuries; no indentation and paragraph separation used to be fashionable for some time in the first half of the 20th century, but good typographers avoid it.
    – egreg
    Apr 28, 2014 at 22:13
  • Thanks for your comment. I'll use this best practice from now on.
    – user25665
    Apr 30, 2014 at 6:56
  • Welcome to TeX.SX! Usually, we don't put a greeting or a “thank you” in our posts. While this might seem strange at first, it is not a sign of lack of politeness, but rather part of our trying to keep everything very concise. Accepting and upvoting answers is the preferred way here to say “thank you” to users who helped you. A suggestion: Do us a favour and change your username to something more telling than "user1234".
    – Martin Schröder
    May 1, 2014 at 16:43

1 Answer 1

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The \parskip package tries to avoid applying a nonzero parskip in the table of contents; to this effect it checks whether the macro \@starttoc has the same meaning as in the LaTeX kernel, in order to modify it.

The amsart class indeed changes the meaning of \@starttoc, because it uses a slightly different approach for typesetting the table of contents and similar lists. So the check performed by parskip with \CheckCommand fails and an error is raised.

Solution: don't use parskip together with amsart. The class follows the AMS editorial guidelines, which (happily) don't allow vertical separation between paragraphs.

Of course “happily” is related to my opinion that this vertical separation is a horrible typographical device in books and journals. It makes white strips that destroy the uniformity of a page; if the paragraphs are short, the effect is even worse.

Imporant note: not all black and white stripes are bad

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