For many beginners (and many with more experience), the biggest obstacle to using LaTeX is the difficulty of figuring out what is causing an error. A message about something not being \def
ed, for instance, will make no sense to a novice LaTeX user who might possibly have heard of \newcommand
, but certainly not \def
. Additionally, line numbers can be misleading, and error message sometimes print out macros given by internal definitions that bear no resemblance to the user's code that actually created the problem.
Is there any hope that next-generation TeX tools like LaTeX3, LuaTeX, and ConTeXt will provide (and/or force package authors to use) a better mechanism for handling errors?
For instance, would it be remotely feasible to include something remotely resembling "print stack trace"?
xparse
to give errors at the TeX level such that they 'hide' the internals.--human-readable
(disabled by default) for the new behaviour, then people would at least have a choice. But I don't think it will be an easy task to implement that. TeX operates on the lowest level and lacks certain information which is required for better error messages.