I received a bug report for ebgaramond-maths
. Although the issue is clearly caused by my package in one sense, it is not clear to me whether there is anything which I should do about it beyond expanding on the declaration in the documentation or setting it in \Huge
. (\bfseries
would, naturally, be ineffective in this context.)
The documentation already states that characters are missing from the OML encoding and notes this as a limitation of the font rather than the package. This is true.
What I did not quite appreciate is the fact that LaTeX does not generate terribly useful warnings about missing characters in this kind of case. Warnings are written to the log file but they are not exactly helpful:
Missing character: There is no ( in font EBGaramond12-Italic--oml-ebgaramond!
Missing character: There is no * in font EBGaramond12-Italic--oml-ebgaramond!
are the warnings generated for the following code:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{ebgaramond-maths}
\begin{document}
$\leftharpoonup \rightharpoonup$
\end{document}
which produces a blank page. In a longer document, it would hardly be obvious which symbols are, in fact, missing. (I'm guessing there is a correspondence in terms of encoding slot places but few users are going to see that or to know how to follow it up, even my guess is right.)
The reason for the blank page is that ebgaramond-maths
has to declare an EBGaramond replacement for letters
and LaTeX does not fall-back to another font when it fails to find characters in a font, in the way that it does if it fails to find the font itself. (At least, I think that is what is happening.)
So ebgaramond-maths
magically makes characters disappear just as a text font which lacks characters can make letters and text symbols disappear: without the package, the symbol would appear; with the package, the symbol vanishes.
I'm not sure what I can or should do about this. The most appropriate workaround will, after all, depend on the rest of the user's font configuration (e.g. if other stuff is being used for maths). Although newtxmath
is recommended for integrals and braces, this is ultimately up to the user and it would surely be inappropriate to draw on symbols from other fonts as part of ebgaramond-maths
itself.
What is the recommended policy/practice/response to problems of this kind?