Ask HN: Why are LaTeX error messages so baffling?

17 points·ISL··9 comments

LaTeX errors are 'well defined', i.e. they have a set way they appear, so they can be parsed by a machine.

They aren't really meant for you, as a user, but rather for whatever is calling LaTeX as a library. It's one of the reasons that an IDE is recommended rather than a text editor.

You can see a good breakdown here. [0]

[0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Errors_and_Warnings

One could make a similar argument for compilers, too, but can they not have great error messages?

The error messages from LaTeX are intended to be parsed by a machine. They aren't meant to be the first stop.

If we want to compare it to other compilers, LaTeX outputs similar error messages to C++, that is, it gives you the error tree, not an error message.

It's output isn't meant to be the final stop for the user. It's one stop short.

Is there a LaTeX wrapper that gives comprehensible error messages? ("Sure looks like you left off a } on line 30")

ChkTeX [0] on *nix, or lacheck [1] for Windows.

[0] http://baruch.ev-en.org/proj/chktex/

[1] https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/lacheck

So cool. Thank you! :)!

LaTeX looks a bit like semantic markup, but is implemented as layers of macros on top of TeX primitives.

Some errors may only be detected in the later stages of processing, making it difficult to relate them to the original LaTeX.

Great question, glad I am not the only one. So much great stuff you can do with Rmarkdown but inevitably you have to dig deep into LaTeX if you are going to customize/standardize docs to your business.

Out of cheese error.

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