Re: TeX error handling

[Karl Berry]

Hi Simon,

    Am I alone in thinking the TeX error messages are unreadable?

Not alone, but I would not go so far as to say they are "unreadable".
There is a purpose behind all of them, they aren't just there for fun.

    The gnutls.log didn't help me either, but I'm attaching it in case
    it is useful to someone.

Ah, now I see that you do have file:line:error msgs enabled.  Sorry
about that.

    /home/jas/src/gnutls/gnutls-1.1.16/doc/gnutls.texi:47: Could not open file 
gnutls-logo.eps, ignoring it

Despite the "ignoring it", this is in fact why it exited with bad
status.  I can't think of a better way to word it, offhand.

    Starting points on making the TeX output more readable:

Well, the suggestions are appreciated, but I'm not sure I can agree with
all of them.  There's probably no point in a lengthy discussion
about it, though.

    Or write a filter to translate TeX errors 

This would be possible.  The basic idea could be to run TeX, redirecting
the output away from the terminal, and then go back post-facto and look
through the output file, reconstructing and writing the messages.  In
some cases, the .log file has more info that could be useful, too.

It sounds like kind of a fun project, actually, but it's not something I
can commit to doing.  Volunteers welcome, as always :).

Thanks,
k