[XeTeX] handling malformed UTF-8 input

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 22 févr. 08 à 13:25, Andreas Matthias a écrit :

> I just had the impression that your posting before last was
> focusing on the question of error/warning. IMHO an error would
> be better but a warning is not harmful either.

Just to add a "usability" side to the issue: from experience when  
people in my department ask for help debugging (La)TeX documents which  
don't typeset, I can tell that most people don't care about warnings,  
don't read them, in a GUI hide or close the console without reading.  
They just don't care: provided a documents typesets to the end and  
returns output (I mean a PDF file), they absolutely don't care at all  
about overfull or underfull boxes, equations too big to fit on a line,  
unwanted font switches, etc. I don't approve this attitude, but in my  
(mechanics) department, for people writing scientific texts, proposals  
and the like, that's what I've seen with most (La)TeX users.

I can see Ross'es (is that how you write this in English? -- I'm not  
sure) point regarding automated treatment. But if you want to direct  
the user's attention to a problem, I think a warning is doomed to fail  
in most cases, and an error is required: it's only when the typeset  
fails and is interrupted that the user will care.

Bruno Voisin