Message-Id: <199402031011.AA15106@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Thu, 3 Feb 1994 11:10:19 +0100
From: Frank Mittelbach <MITTELBACH@mzdmza.zdv.uni-mainz.de>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: No file Ueuf.fd
Status: R

> Subj: "No file Ueuf.fd"

> Every LaTeX user knows that the message
>       No file paper.aux
> is unimportant - it will be followed by "there are unresolved references"
> and later go away.
>
> The message
>         No file Ueuf.fd
> is more serious.  It actually means that a lot of formulae will come out
> as garbage. But LaTeX2e passes over this error as if it didn't matter.
> (Yes, I know that this happenned because I'd forgotten to add nfss2 to
> my TEXINPUTS, but that's not the point.)

no it happened because unfortunately there is no standard set of
encodings for math right now. Actually there shouldn't be U encodings
at all.

I do agree that one should consider making this an error condition but
then there is the point that for text fonts this is usually an
acceptable compromise and that there is a large group of user who
really do not like to get errors for everything.

> I suggest that \try@load@fontshape should
> (1) try another encoding, maybe U
> (2) make up the \DeclareFontShape command according to some standard
>     encoding, such as simply cmrbxit10 for bold italic.

trying another encoding is wrong as, for example, if a document
requests times but you don't have such fonts the above solution will
choose fonts with the same encoding but other shapes and thus in most
circumstances produce readable results (not in math, i grant that)

> Then at least the error will show up when the TFM file is not found,
> so that it's apparent that something to do with fonts is missing.
>
> "the user will get a TeX error message"
>
> So what's wrong with that? After each \font command you can test whether
> what you've got is \nullfont and substitute something else,
> and give a more informative LaTeX message.

yes we can test for everything and we do test for a lot in 2e and
already people complaining about the system being to slow. So again
you have a tradeoff which is not solvable.

but i do agree that such missing fd files could and perhaps should be
flagged stronger. what about a message at the end saying in bold
letters that the document couldn't be printed with the requested
fonts?

frank