Re: How can I check for the existence of a glyph in TeX?

[Rebecca and Rowland <rebecca@astrid.u-net.com>]

At 12:31 pm +0100 9/9/98, Berthold Horn wrote:
>At 04:15 AM 9/9/98 +0100, Rebecca and Rowland wrote:
>
>>>This is a tough one, since Knuth worked with fonts that had no missing
>glyphs.
>>>Hence there is little support for this sort of thing.  For example, missing
>>>glyph
>>>messages do not appear on screen in most TeX implementations, only in the
>>>log file (which means they are mostly never seen), and then do not contain
>>>any context information (so it can be very hard to find out where they
>>>com from).  In any case just testing the character causes an error message
>>>to be emitted if it is not there. I suppose you could read in the log file
>>>and check afterwards :-)?
>
>>An idea...  The problem is that as far as the tfm file is concerned, the
>>slot is not empty in general when it `points to' a missing glyph: you get a
>>missing glyph rule in the dvi file and a warning there, not in the log
>>file.
>
>Not in the TFM files I use.

But you use different tfm files to the rest of the world, don't you?

>  If there is no glyph there is should say so.
>Anything else is deceptive.

Those of us in the rest of the world who use vf files are in a different
position.  There's no deception involved: if there is no glyph, it *does*
tell you.  But...  It's the dvi driver that tells you all about the missing
glyph when you come to look at the dvi file.

Rowland.