A number of our reports are produced in PDF format using pdflatex. We used to do it using docbook but the Java toolchain for converting to PDF was too slow and consumed more memory than we had available (our server 'only' has 4GB of memory). We used to generate the docbook XML files using HTML::Mason so when we switched to using LaTeX we continued to use Mason to generate the .tex files.
I'm not a TeX guy but apparently \\ is TeX for newline. Unfortunately if it's at the end of the line, Mason trims the last slash and the newline character, leaving us with \whatever_was_at_the_start_of_the_next_line.
Apparently the 'fix' that was used when the problem was encountered was to use \\\ at the end of the lines.
This week we upgraded some servers from debian woody to sarge (the 'new' stable release) and in doing so went from Mason 1.05 to 1.26. Apparently, this brought a subtle change in the handling of multiple slashes at the end of a line.
I've now replaced all occurrences of \\\ with \newline and now everything's happy again.
