LaTeX: Package textcomp Warning: Symbol \textasciigrave not provided

[mgeier]

The "Font warnings" are another can of worms. I only looked briefly (well not so briefly sadly and worst is that I did not complete fully investigation) at

Package textcomp Warning: Symbol \textasciigrave not provided by (textcomp) font family zlmtt in TS1 encoding. (textcomp) Default family used instead on input line 3594.

As far as I can tell for now this is triggered by

• \usepackage[light,scaled=1.05]{zlmtt} in preamble,
• together with some backticks ` in verbatim cells, which translate into \textasciigrave,
• and the textcomp package erroneously reports that the backtick character is not available in TS1 encoding for zlmtt font family, whereas in fact it is available at slot 96.

At thsi stage my guess is that textcomp is not aware of relatively recent zlmtt font package (2014), but I pushed investigation only half-way so maybe the above is all wrong.

And some other things such as

[10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

Package textcomp Warning: Symbol \textasciigrave not provided by (textcomp) font family pplj in TS1 encoding. (textcomp) Default family used instead on input line 1267.

[16] [17] [18] I did not look at yet.

These things can usually be ignored if some correct glyph ends up in PDF, although sometimes it needlessly enlarge PDF size from loading a substitute font.

(all of the above with "font" meaning one of those famous TeX fonts with only room for 128 or 256 glyphs each.)

---

I was told an easy solution already more than a year ago at https://github.com/latex3/latex2e/issues/478 but I had forgotten about it (and opened earlier today a new isse https://github.com/latex3/latex2e/issues/905 at their project, but it is almost a duplicate).

Thus:

The LaTeX warnings related to \textasciigrave can be silenced adding this in the preamble:

\DeclareTextSymbolDefault{\textasciigrave}{TS1}

It may be worthwile to add

\tracinglostchars=3

to preamble. This causes a LaTeX build error in case a font is missing a character glyph... (since TeXLive 2021 release), and is mostly very useful in the context of Unicode engines (xetex, luatex) and OpenType fonts.

Originally posted by @jfbu in https://github.com/spatialaudio/nbsphinx/issues/657#issuecomment-1206136935

[mgeier]

The cause of this warning has been fixed in #658, but the problem can appear again when there is a stray backtick somewhere.

[jfbu]

At thsi stage my guess is that textcomp is not aware of relatively recent zlmtt font package (2014),

I reported the issue to the zlmtt (a monospace font which was used here for code-block renderings) maintainer and he has made an update so the issue will not show in future.

Changes in version 1.032

1. Added code to zlmtt.sty to specify sub-encoding 0. (Latex assigned sub-encoding 9, preventing some textcomp glyphs from rendering correctly.)

As per Palatino font pplj which is maintained by LaTeX team, I think no update will happen there, so the \DeclareTextSymbolDefault{\textasciigrave}{TS1} work-around might be needed in future if the issue re-surfaces due to some stray backtick. See https://github.com/latex3/latex2e/issues/905. If some people actually look at their latex build logs... they might read this comment in future and learn about this workaround here ;-) or perhaps identify a problem in their sources explaining the stray backtick...