Missing character warning in PDF build

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

In my PDF builds, while LaTeX is running, I am seeing the following warning repeatedly in the LaTeX logs:

Missing character: There is no ; ("3B) in font nullfont!

I don't see anything that looks wrong, so I'm hoping I can safely ignore it?

[Rob Beezer]

There are, and continue to be, repeated obscure warnings in the LaTeX log.
Sometimes we sort things out and some group of warnings goes away. And that is
usually an improvemnent in some small way. But I am ignoring them for the time
being.

However, if any TeXnician wants to determine the souce of an one group
(including this one), we might be able to make the necessary changes to squelch
them. It'd be nice to have a clean and tidy log file. Just because.

Thaks,
Rob

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[Sean Fitzpatrick]

Figured this one out. I am blaming Greg Hartman ;-)

He created a bunch of TikZ macros using \newcommand, for things that are drawn repeatedly.

But if you have a command like \newcommand{\drawxlines}, where the necessary Tikz semicolons are built into the command,

you do not want to call them in your TikZ picture with \drawxlines; (even if every other line in your TikZ code ends with a semicolon).

This introduces an extra semicolon.

[Michael Doob]

I would be a little careful in ignoring nullfont messages. It indicates, of course,  that TeX is trying to typeset a (printable) character
when there is no printing font defined. When this happens to me, it usually means I've something wrong in a  computation within
a macro. In this case the "3B is a semicolon, a hint. Using something like \font\nullfont=cmr12 will print the miscreant character(s),
which may help find the problem. In any case, the message means that there is a difference between what you as the coder 
intend and what TeX is doing. At times I have had to comment out enough material to make the message go away in order to
find and fix. 

[Sean Fitzpatrick]

In my case it was some poorly implemented TikZ macros.

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