[pracjourn-forum] For our error collection

[Peter Flynn]

On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 01:32, Steve Peter wrote:
> On Oct 19, 2005, at 7:36 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
> >     Another one (which came up twice in the same training
> >     session last week) was not etting any title or author
> >     because of forgetting \maketitle.
> > 
> > I added that one.
> 
> 
> I don't understand. What is the cryptic error message here? 

This one is unusual because there precisely *isn't* any error message.

> I thought part of the point of this exercise was to help get clearer
> error messages for the users. 

Perhaps this is being too diplomatic. The point should be to help the
user when they have made an error, either of commission or (in this
case) of omission.

> Having something not appear because you didn't put it in seems far
> from that mark. 

I'd agree in the case of, for example, leaving out a \section and then
complaining that it didn't print your section title. In the present
case, however, the user would have entered \title, \author, and maybe
\date, but still not seen them printed because \maketitle was omitted.

> Or are you saying that if your source has \author or \title that a
> warning should be issued? That actually would be useful.

It wouldn't be too hard to rig a package which redefined the abstract,
table of contents, and part|chapter|section to emit an error if there
had been no \maketitle seen yet (but only emit one error message :-)
But I think it's easier just to document that you need \maketitle if
you want the titling information processed.

///Peter