[texworks] [XeTeX] Overfull boxes return status of 0 in XeTeX

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Sun Mar 13 17:58:23 CET 2016


2016-03-13 17:41 GMT+01:00 Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:

>
>
> Julian Bradfield wrote:
>
> > Do you have a full list of all possible now-and-future events that
> > you might want to flag this way?
>
> Yes. Anything/everything for which TeX issues a warning, either to the
> log file or to the console or both. The TeX source code is so modular
> and so well structured that it should be relatively easy to identify
> what warnings can be issued.
>
> > What about LaTeX/Plain TeX/AMSTeX warnings? They can be equally
> > important, but I don't think the core *TeX engine knows about them.
>
> Then there would need to be a further extension that would allow any
> package to signal a warning which could be handled in the same way.
>

In other words, a new TeX primitive will have to be added.

>
> > Just wrap *TeX in a script that greps the log file and accepts your
> > desired command line arguments. Then only *one* person, namely you,
> > has to do the work, and you can make the script available to any
> > other front-end authors and maintain it for them. It wouldn't take
> > long.
>
> A "script" in what language ?  Each and every front end almost certainly
> has its own scripting language, so there is no "one size fits all"
> solution when it comes to TeX front ends.  But the *TeX engine is common
> to all front ends, so it is at this point of commonality that it makes
> most sense to make the change.
>

Nowadays all TeX distros have lua.

>
> > In terms of programmer efficiency, that's much better than asking
> > several different people to hack on C (or whatever language *TeX is
> > written in) and maintain consistent lists of possible command-line
> > switch values every time you think of a new case you want to detect.
> > As observed by several of us, computer time efficiency is irrelevant
> > for such trivial tasks as grepping *TeX log files. (Even on a
> > decade-old computer, the time to grep a typical log file will be
> > measured in a very small number of milliseconds.)
>
> No "grepping" would be needed if *TeX could be asked to optionally
> return a non-zero status if a TeX warning had been issued during the
> compilation.  TeXworks already searches the log file for errors,
> warnings and bad boxes, but only if a non-zero status is returned by the
> engine; all I am asking for is for the engine maintainers to help
> TeXworks by optionally returning a non-zero status code if a warning had
> been issued.
>

I can imagine the following problems:
Overful \hbox
Overful \vbox
Underful \hbox
Uverful \vbox
Undefined label
Duplicate label
Labels have changed
Undefined citation
Duplicate citation
Missing character in a font

Now suppose that the document contains 5 overful hboxes, 12 underful
hboxes, 4 underful vboxes, 3 undefined labels, 1 duplicate labes, changed
labels, 153 missing citation, 52 missing characters. What status should be
returned so that I could get this information without looking into the log
file? (Yes/No answer might be sufficient without giving the exact numbers.)

>
> Philip Taylor
>



Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



>
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