Hi, I believe there has been some misunderstanding here that I'd like to try to clear up.
Personally, I think that the exit code policy of TeX is good. IMO, exit codes should be (and are) used to report fundamental errors (such as "program not found" or "I don't understand this input"), not for conveying complex "additional" information. In that context, I think it is irrelevant whether a program produces exactly the output the users wants (especially since different people may want different things; note the difference between "wants" and "has asked for") - as long as the program reaches its normal end, the exit code should be 0 (=success). For more complex information, you will need to analyze the log (as others said already). Now, regarding TeXworks and the issue at hand. TeXworks displays the output of the TeX process in a console window. After TeX finishes, scripts can be run that, e.g., parse the console output and condense it into a more human-friendly form. What happens to the console after TeX finishes can be selected from the following three modes: 1) the user can choose to always keep the console open 2) the user can choose to always hide the console if TeX finishes successfully (i.e., with exit code 0) 3) the user can choose a hybrid approach that closes the console if TeX finishes successfully unless it was opened manually by the user before (this is the default in recent versions). So, the console always remains open if TeX exits with a non-zero status code, but will typically be closed otherwise. Presumably, it was this behavior that led to the request of a non-zero exit code for other conditions (e.g., if warnings occur). However, it can be worked around relatively easily by manually opening the console (which should then remain open until closed manually). Another potential approach mentioned before was to let the log parser script determine whether or not the console should be closed. This, unfortunately, raises some other issues. The scripts run after typesetting are not necessarily inspecting the log at all (for all we know, they could tweet "I used TeX" or whatever), so they need not be able to provide any insight into whether the TeX run was successful. More importantly, though, several scripts could be run (say, one that looks only for errors and only that only looks for warnings) which could give contradicting results (e.g., no errors => close, warnings => don't close). Thus, TeXworks currently does not let scripts control the console. The way I use it is the following: while writing, I keep the console closed (configured in mode 3 above such that it closes as long as there are no errors preventing typesetting). When I am at the stage of "polishing", I open the console manually, which then stays open until I close it again manually. The approach of a wrapper would work as well, but, as pointed out already, is more difficult to implement on Windows than on Unix-derived OSs. I hope this sheds some light into this. Best, Stefan -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
