# Understanding cryptic latex errors: font shape undefined

I have a couple of errors in my log about LatinModernMath fonts.

LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape TU/LatinModernMath(1)/bx/n' undefined
(Font)              using TU/LatinModernMath(1)/m/n' instead on input line 225

LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape TU/LatinModernMath(2)/bx/n' undefined
(Font)              using TU/LatinModernMath(2)/m/n' instead on input line 225


How do I find out which file those lines belong to? It's a really big document with lots of math split in several files (merged with \include), I'd like to check if the shape it's falling back to is ok, but I have no idea what to look for.

I'm using xelatex with unicode-math, main font Minion, math font Latin Modern Math.

• Using Latin Modern for math and Minion for text is a capital sin; they're visually incompatible. Anyhow, the question cannot be answered in its current form. – egreg Mar 15 '18 at 10:31
• those are warnings not errors. you could choose to ignore them, as long as your document is typeset (almost) properly, or go on to a deep level debug. – naphaneal Mar 15 '18 at 10:37
• @naphaneal sure I could ignore them more easily if I had any idea about which shape it's referring to, or even which file. – filippo Mar 15 '18 at 10:38
• it is telling you that there is no bold latin modern math and so it's using the normal weight one instead, note that math fonts need to be set up in advance so you will get this warning even if you do not use any bold in math unless you explicitly disable setting up of bold math – David Carlisle Mar 15 '18 at 10:47
• \symbf does not require a bold font (that's the main reason a new command was introduced instead of \mathbf which does require a bold font) – David Carlisle Mar 15 '18 at 11:16

Bold symbols accessed via \symbf does not require a bold font, it instead takes the bold characters from the bold mathematical characters in the Unicode mathematical characters block. That's the main reason a new command was introduced instead of \mathbf which does require a bold font. \symbf changes the character number of the character to be accessed rather than changing the font. So the warning does not affect \symbf but would for example mean that \boldmath (or the AMS \boldsymbol) will produce normal weight not bold.
• thank you, \symbf was actually the very reason why I started using unicode-math as I couldn't get a couple of symbols (mostly \theta) to be bold with neither of \mathbf, \boldsymbol, \bm... – filippo Mar 15 '18 at 11:27