[OS X TeX] Conflict between dingbats and amssymb

[Gary L. Gray]

On Jan 7, 2009, at 1:17 PM, Matti Vallinkoski wrote:

> is there an easy solution to the following problem:
> I want  to use some dingbats (\rightthumbsdown, \rightthumbsup,  
> \leftthumbsup and\leftthumbsdown) with the amssymb fonts (especially  
> \blacksquare and alike), but I keep getting the error message
> !LaTeX Error: Command \checkmark already defined.
>           Or name \end... illegal, see p. 192 of the manual.
>
> I have not found any solution by googling.
>
> Minimal example:
> \documentclass{memoir}
> \usepackage{amssymb}
> \usepackage{dingbat}

I will be interesting to see if there is an elegant solution to this.  
When this has happened to me, I have copied the package containing the  
defined symbol I do not want, renamed it, saved it in:

~/Library/texmf/tex/latex

and then commented out that definition.

-- Gary