[pracjourn-forum] For our error collection

[Peter Flynn]

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 15:38, Steve Peter wrote:
> On Sep 9, 2005, at 9:11 AM, Peter Flynn wrote:
> > I might toy with this in my copious spare time during those long
> > winter evenings I hear so much about...:-)
> 
> 
> My long winter evenings get eaten by the work left over from the short
> winter afternoons! :-)
> > Unfortunately this particular one was a TeX message.
> 
> 
> Partially. 

Oops. My fault (you can see I'm no mathematician). I thought \: was
actually defined in plain TeX.

> LaTeX does some finagling before it hits that point (since the Plain
> TeX error is "undefined control sequence"), so perhaps it should
> (might, might could, [insert your favorite modal verb here]) intercept
> and issue a more informative message before it hits the base TeX error
> message. 

Unfortunately a front-end would have to rely on the log output alone.
And in this case no plain TeX error message ever gets output:

! Missing $ inserted.
<inserted text> 
                $
l.3 This is \TeX\:

///Peter