Printglossary fix breaks build scripts like latexmk

[stefanct]

Hi,
I was using your hack to keep \printglossary from inserting empty pages. Unfortunately there is a problem with creating the file before \printglossary (

ult-base/texmf-tds/tex/latex/ult-base/ult-printglossary.sty

Line 58 in f771e58

\newwrite\ult@tmp@glossary@file

) is called resulting in the glossary (or list of abbreviation in my case) to not be printed at all because the .acr file is never created correctly.

I am using latexmk to automate building. It relies on parsing the stdout prints to derive the which files do not exist and launches the respective build steps (like executing makeglossaries). This does not longer happen which your hack. I tried to fix that by pretending that the file is not really there (by adding \typeout{No file ##1.}. Unfortunately this does not fool latexmk :(

Also, \immediate\write\ult@tmp@glossary@file{} adds a newline character to the resulting file. You can simply leave that out to create an empty file (dunno if that could a regression or fixes other use cases - JFYI). I don't have tried further to find a fix because I have no time ATM (and lost lots of it already due to this :/). Maybe patching \@print@glossary directly instead would work better?

BTW: why is Nicola doing that \null there anyway? Maybe we should ask her (she is very responsive on stackexchange).

[egraff]

This is a very interesting problem! Originally, the reason I went for the current workaround is that patching could more easily break when the package gets updated, which is harder to maintain (especially if there is a need to support older versions/installs of the package). I could have another look, though 🙂 however, I do like your suggestion about trying to ask Nicola - would you be up for writing a question on TeX stackexchange, if that is the easiest way forwards?

My main concern, if I were to change the workaround to patch the glossary command, is how to ensure the code does not regress, if the goal is to better support latexmk. I don't currently have any 'test infrastructure' that would allow me to write a test that ensures a document will build using a custom build script (and I do unfortunately not have a lot of time to spend on this). In case I do get some spare cycles, though, do you have a minimal latexmk file I could experiment with?

[stefanct]

Hi,
for testing you can use the following files after removing the .txt suffix. Compile with latexmk -pdf and clean up between commenting in/out the \usepackage{ult-printglossary} statement with latexmk -C
latexmkrc.txt
test.tex.txt

When ult-printglossary is not loading the second page shows the list of abbreviations. When it is active only the title is shown on the second page. If you don't see a proper way to fix this I can post it on SA but feel free to take my example and ask yourself. You probably know better what's going on - after looking into it for a short time to formulate this report I forgot most of what I learned about it already :)

[stefanct]

Just for reference (because I would regularly run into this once in a while ;)
My SA question from last year (with a response by Ulrike Fischer): https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/526238/why-is-glossaries-so-eager-to-insert-null

And my report on Nicola's tracker: 146 (which she deemed a duplicate of 102.

Basically this means WONTFIX. Again, I have no time to look into a feasible workaround right now. :|

[jorag]

I think I have the same problem when using the uit-thesis template in Overleaf. The glossary is not printed at least.

Did anyone find a workaround?

[jorag]

I think I have the same problem when using the uit-thesis template in Overleaf. The glossary is not printed at least.

Did anyone find a workaround?

I got it working. I assume I have caused the issue myself by messing around with the files trying to fix something else.

What I did was to get the package from a version I knew was working: https://github.com/egraff/uit-thesis/tree/338297d50a63e6d879e85003f6e73856da0c895c

Then I uploaded the packages as folders in the Overleaf project and used the following commands in the preamble:

\usepackage{uit-base/ult-glossaries}
\usepackage{uit-base/ult-printglossary}
\newglossaryentry{latex}
{
    name=latex,
    description={Is a markup language specially suited 
    for scientific documents}
}
\makeglossaries

Then in the frontmatter:

\tableofcontents
\printglossary