## Logging

### Controlling printing

The following settings are used to control what is printed during initialization and event generations.

`flag` Print:init (`default = on`)
If disabled, messages (except for errors) are suppressed during initialization. In order to show only certain types of information, use the `Init:showProcesses`, `Init:showMultipartonInteractions`, `Init:showChangedSettings`, `Init:showAllSettings`, `Init:showChangedParticleData`, `Init:showChangedResonanceData`, `Init:showAllParticleData`, and `Init:showOneParticleData` settings.

`flag` Print:next (`default = on`)
If disabled, messages (except for errors) are suppressed during event generation. In order show only certain types of information, use the `Next:numberCount`, `Next:numberShowLHA`, `Next:numberShowInfo`, `Next:numberShowProcess`, and `Next:numberShowEvent` settings.

`flag` Print:quiet (`default = off`)
Can be set on to avoid the printing during program execution, to the largest extent possible. This is equivalent to turning off the three flags above.

### Error messages

Error messages are printed through the Logger class. There are five types of error messages:

- Abort: An abort message indicates a critical error that might prevent further event generation from taking place. Examples: unable to find particle database; invalid user settings; calling `Pythia::next` after initialization failed.
- Error: An error indicates that something has gone wrong during event generation. When an error occurs in a function, it usually means that function failed to execute. It is possible that the calling function is able to recover, otherwise the event will fail to generate.
- Warning: Warning messages indicate an exceptional case that the function is able to recover from. They are usually not a cause for concern, but a large number of warnings could indicate that there is something wrong with your configuration.
- Info: Info messages provide information that is not an error. Example: when the parallel framework automatically detects the number of hardware threads, this number is output as an Info message.
- Report: Report messages are used to provide additional details that may be relevant for debugging purposes. These messages are off by default.

In the `Logger` class, the `abortMsg`, `errorMsg`, `warningMsg`, and `infoMsg` methods are used to generate messages of the corresponding types. However, the standard way to output error messages is through the `ABORT_MSG`, `ERROR_MSG`, `WARNING_MSG`, and `INFO_MSG` macros. These macros expand to the corresponding methods, but automatically replaces the first argument by `__METHOD_NAME__`. For example, the two lines are equivalent:

- `infoPtr->ERROR_MSG("an error occurred");`
- `infoPtr->errorMsg(__METHOD_NAME__, "an error occurred");`

The reason macros are used this way is that there is no other easy way to automatically propagate the name of the method where the error occurred.

The following settings are used to control error logging features.

`flag` Print:errors (`default = on`)
If on, error messages are printed to the console the first time each of them occurs. Even if off, errors are still logged and displayed when calling `Pythia::stat`.

`mode` Print:verbosity (`default = 2`; `minimum = 0`; `maximum = 3`)
This setting determines which types of diagnostic messages are logged. Messages that don't satisfy the verbosity level will not be printed when calling `Pythia::stat`.
`option` 0 : No error messages are logged.
`option` 1 : Only critical abort messages are logged.
`option` 2 : All normal messages are logged (default).
`option` 3 : Also report messages are logged, and errors and warnings are printed every time they occur instead of just the first time. Useful for user-level debugging, where combining with `Next:numberCount = 1` will allow easier identification of problematic events.

`flag` Print:useErrorStream (`default = off`)
By default, all logger messages are written to `cout`. If this flag is turned on, error messages will instead be written to `cerr`.