On Mon, 5 Jun 2006, "Guðmundur J. Kristjánsson" wrote:

Just a quick note regarding "silentness" in Context.

I have on two occasions had problems with silent errors:

1) When using the bib module and putting spaces between citation variables and their value. For example, doing:

\startpublication[k = ArcticCorsairTrawling, t = misc]

instead of

\startpublication[k=ArcticCorsairTrawling, t=misc]

2) When trying to define an abstract command: \definestartstop [abstract] [before={\midaligned{\bf Abstract} \startnarrower[2*middle]}, after={\stopnarrower \blank[big]}]

In this case the command was defined when I used "...before = ..." but did not alter the text in any way.

So after all this rambling I have two questions: 1) Is this silent mode intended?

No, this is the usual behaviour.

2) Is whitespace not allowed before or after when defining with or using the "=" sign?

Parially, space after = is fine, space before = is ignored silently. This is because with \dosetvalue {one}{a}{ b} \onea is defined, while with \dosetvalue {one}{a }{ b} \onea is undefined. Hans, can \dosetvalue be defined to ignore the space of #2, something like \unprotect \def\dosetvalue#1#2#3% {\dodosetvalue{#1}[#2]#3} \def\dodosetvalue#1[#2#3]#4% {\doifelse{#3}{\space} {\@EA\def\csname#1#2\endcsname{#4}} {\@EA\def\csname#1#2#3\endcsname{#4}}} With this \dosetvalue {one}{a }{ b} (\onea) works, but this does not work for \definestartstop [abstract] [before = {{\bf Abstract}}] I do not know the implication in terms of speed. In case there is a heavy penality, one can have a switch to ignore spaces in value assignments. Aditya

Aditya Mahajan wrote:

On Mon, 5 Jun 2006, Hans Hagen wrote:

...

Aditya Mahajan wrote:

...

Hi,

when I try

texmfstart whatever

nothing happens. Shouldn't a warning or an error be given to say that texmfstart could not find 'whatever'. This will make it easier to detect typos while trying out commands by hand.

I do get such a message when using texmfstart --verbose whatever, but I think that such a behaviour should be default.

Hans, is it reasonable to define a method report_error(str) in

class KpseRemote def report_error(str) $stderr.puts(str) end end

and modify line 2110 of texmfstart.rb to

def run(fullname) if ! fullname || fullname.empty? then %%% report("the file '#{$filename}' is not found") report_error("the file '#{$filename}' is not found") .....

Maybe there are other places also where an error report will be useful.

there is the non-verbose checking

def output(str) $stdout.puts(str) end

so we can use

output("the file '#{$filename}' is not found")

this will be fine.

...

(i dislike stderr -)

Any particular reason?

mostly that it takes more work to collect both when piping (to a log file) and so, either i want to see messages or not and verbose can control that Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------