[texhax] Summary: Incompatible list can't be unboxed

[László Kálmán]

Dear All,

I've just subscribed to the texhax list (as a matter of fact, just because  
I had this problem), and I'm very glad I did so.  Several people wrote to  
me personally, giving me the guidelines to finding out what my problem may  
originate from.  Let me summarize those answers (I don't know if this is a  
common usage here).  Also, I hope it is OK to mention the people who  
helped me.

The problem seems to be (as in many other cases in TeX, as in many  
programming languages, too) that the error messages do not always stem  
 from where the problem lies.  You can easily get messages like  
"Incompatible list can't be unhboxed" (which originally means: don't try  
to \unhbox a vertical box or vice versa) or "Missing endgroup inserted" or  
"Missing } inserted" when

		*your table/float/box is too large to fit on a page.*

This is actually what happened to me.  It has happened to others, but few  
have written about it on the net: if you Google the error message, you get  
this reference:  
http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg49824.html

I thank Yuri Robbers for the most detailed reply, but also Hartmut Henkel  
and Philip Taylor, who sent me valuable comments and links.

Best -- L