Re: Validate (cross)references

[Jesse Alama <jesse.alama@gmail.com>]

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On 2011-05-27 17:19:30 +0200, Andreas Schneider said:

> On Friday, May 27, 2011 17:09 Wolfgang Schuster wrote:
> 
>> Am 27.05.2011 um 17:04 schrieb Andreas Schneider:
> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> if  I  use  \in,  \about,  \at  or  anything  else  that  generates  a
>>> cross-reference,  and  that  reference  happens to be invalid (typo or
>>> whatever),  it  just  prints  out  "nothing".  Is  there a way to have
>>> context throw an error if a reference is invalid? (That probably would
>>> only  make  sense  in the second pass of context, since the first pass
>>> has to collect the references first.)
> 
>> Unknown references are shown as “??” in your text.
> 
>> Wolfgang
> 
> True,  I  was  mostly  thinking  about "\about", which just prints two
> quotation  marks  and  nothing  in between. But my "problem" (if I can
> even  call  it  that, since grep is already a solution, just maybe not
> the  best one :D) is, that I could easily miss such small changes. I'm
> working  on  technical  documentation  that  even  has  parts that are
> automatically  generated  (from  XML files). I just update whatever is
> necessary  (the document itself, or just the input files), commit them
> to  SVN  and  our  CI  server grabs them, and runs ConTeXt. If ConTeXt
> returns  with  a  return code > 0, the build is marked as "failed" and
> all  necessary  admins  (me  and  my colleague) are informed via eMail
> and/or  RSS  feed.  If  the  build  succeeds,  the  generated  PDF  is
> automatically distributed to the users. I consider wrong references an
> error,  so  I would like the build to fail (imho referencing something
> that  doesn't  exist  is  like using a macro that doesn't exist, which
> fails too).
> 
> But  as I said: if context can't treat that as error, I'm fine with it
> too  and  will  continue  to  grep the logfile. It's just curiosity if
> there may already be a setting/parameter/whatever to get context to be
> more "restrictive".

+1

I would also like ConTeXt to help me keep me document sensible in this 
way. I also resort to grep-type solutions, but sometimes I forget to do 
this, and sometimes, there are embarrassing consequences of such 
oversight.  If ConTeXt could help me avoid this all-too-common 
oversight of mine, I'd be delighted.  Throwing an error would be one 
way to do this.  If throwing an error is not possible, perhaps being 
able to customize what gets printed when an undefined reference is 
encountered.  E.g., instead of "??", a big, annoying, 
impossible-to-miss mark in the margin (as one sees when working with 
overfull lines) or a giant red stopsign saying "UNDEFINED REFERENCE", 
would do just as well.

-- 
Jesse Alama
http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~alama/

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