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Section Troubleshooting Quick Reference
These are the issues that come up most often. Each has already been mentioned in the relevant part of the tutorial; they’re collected here for easy lookup.
The Codespace looks frozen during first-time setup.
First-time setup takes 5 to 10 minutes. Give it fifteen before worrying. If it still hasn’t loaded, close the tab and reopen the Codespace from your repository’s < > Code → Codespaces menu.
pretext new isn’t in the command palette.
The PreTeXt extension may still be initializing. Wait a minute and retry. If it still isn’t there, close and reopen the Codespace.
Build fails with a red error.
Almost always a missing or mismatched tag. Check the line number in the error message. Confirm every
<tag> has a matching </tag>.
Preview is blank or stale.
Build again, then refresh the preview tab with F5. If that fails, close the preview tab and reopen via ▷ PreTeXt → View Full Document.
My Codespace disappeared.
Inactive Codespaces are recycled after about a month. Your files are safe on
github.com as long as you’ve committed and synced. Create a fresh Codespace from the same repository to pick up where you left off.
Deploy URL shows a 404.
Wait 2 to 3 minutes for the first deploy to finish on GitHub’s side. If it still 404s, check Settings → Pages on your repository and confirm the source is set to GitHub Actions.
Deploy fails with a permissions error.
On your repository, go to Settings → Actions → General → Workflow permissions and select Read and write permissions. Save, then run Deploy again.
Something else is wrong.
The PreTeXt community forums and Discord server (see the Information & Links chapter of this hub) are genuinely helpful for unusual problems. Post a short description of what you were trying to do, what happened instead, and any error text. Someone has almost certainly hit the same thing before.
