[pdftex] \tracinglostchars

[Ross Moore]

Hi Jean-François,

On 16 Feb 2021, at 8:08 am, jfbu <jfbu at free.fr<mailto:jfbu at free.fr>> wrote:

Hi Ross,

Le 15 févr. 2021 à 21:14, Ross Moore <ross.moore at mq.edu.au<mailto:ross.moore at mq.edu.au>> a écrit :

… and all this extra noise would just turn off most users anyway.

Serious users, who are aware of how useful the  .log  file really is,
should have the ability to make adjustments for themselves.

You can always put the directive:
  \tracinglostchars2
in your preamble.
It doesn’t need to be a LaTeX default.

I mentioned LaTeX, which was my mistake because
it was not a latex question on this why I did not address
it to the latex team ; however it is relevant to LaTeX
as typically LaTeX produces tons of log output

It sure does!

But it is not even close to what you get when using  \tracingall
to try to diagnose why something is going wrong, when developing
macros to do complicated things.


what I was trying to say is that both

\tracinglostchars1

and

\tracinglostchars2

are lacking imho in usefulness because, whether to terminal
or to the log, their output might easily go unnoticed,
and it is very important indeed what they try to tell the user

sure, if you get a whole bunch of 20 of them in a row,
you might see them in console output, but if you have
only one such warning and are building a 200 pages document
which nowadays is faster than 20 years ago,
the stdout stream flashes bye so quick, you might not
see it

True.
That’s why you have command-line tools like  grep
to find strings within a file.

Or open the  .log  within a text editor and use its ‘Find' facility.

Using TeXshop on a Mac, the Console window is searchable
once a job has completed.
(But that’s not going to show you Missing Characters.


hence my query for a stronger behavior which would
be to add to both stdout and the log file a one-line
warning at end of run

either that, or  a

\tracinglostchars3

which would trigger that

it would match then with some other
of etex report mechanisms

If you are using a script, e.g. to run LaTeX multiple times,
then build the index and run again, etc.  ...

… just add an appropriate  grep   line to look for
infelicities that you know you care about.


Making changes in the TeX engine has to be done with great care.
People have built work-flows assuming the engine behaves in a particular way.

Changing this, however small, can then affect those work-flows in ways
that are not likely to be easily predictable.


As a mathematician, I always say that there’s more than one way to tackle
any given problem or exercise.
One’s first attempt is generally not the best way, which will only become
apparent after several trials and failures.

So too in Computer Programming.
With a complex system like TeX/LaTeX there are many approaches that
can be considered, utilising many different tools.
Your text editor is a vital part of this, and it can be used in imaginative ways.


Thanks,

Jean-François



Hope the helps.

Ross


Dr Ross Moore
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
12 Wally’s Walk, Level 7, Room 734
Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
T: +61 2 9850 8955  |  F: +61 2 9850 8114
M:+61 407 288 255  |  E: ross.moore at mq.edu.au<mailto:ross.moore at mq.edu.au>
http://www.maths.mq.edu.au
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