Re: [AUCTeX] Text corruption

[Tassilo Horn]

"Axel E. Retif" <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Axel,

>>>    GNU Emacs 24.2.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.10)
>>>     of 2012-11-08 on lakoocha, modified by Debian
>>
>>
>> by Robert Browning, from Damien Cassou's ppa. I will install AUCTeX
>> on it and use this exclusively, and see what happens.
>
> Well... this is rather unfortunate!
>
> With this new set up Emacs, right in front my eyes, capitalized a word
> a few lines below where I was typing some text (undoing the typing one
> step at a time suddenly un-capitalized the word),

That you can undo the change speaks against memory corruption, IMO.  And
that it happes only with Emacs, and then only in AUCTeX buffers, also
seems to imply some other problem.

> and then it changed the name of a figure a few lines above where I was
> typing... all this in less than half an hour!
>
>  I will start using TeXmaker --- if this is an issue of memory
> corruption, it should happen sooner or later, right?

If it was some memory corruption, I'd expect that you encounter strange
problems and crashes with more important applications, e.g., crashes of
X, kernel oops, etc.

> If it is an issue of Gnome/Unity, I'm not so sure, as TeXmaker (and
> TeXworks) uses Qt. Could it make a difference?

I have no idea.

Here's a recipe you could try to check who is the culprit.

  1. Fire up emacs
  2. Go to the *scratch* buffer, insert

     (setq debug-on-signal t
           debug-ignored-errors (delq 'buffer-read-only debug-ignored-errors))

     and evaluate the code by typing C-x C-e after the last closing
     paren.
  3. Find one of your latex files where the problem occured
  4. Hit C-x C-q to make the buffer read-only
  5. Wait, maybe scroll a bit or search around, but don't edit

The recipe achieves that if a read-only buffer (like your latex buffer)
gets modified, you are put into the debugger (a *Backtrace* buffer pops
up).  This buffer will show what function wants to modify the buffer
including its call stack.

Hopefully that will shed some light.

Bye,
Tassilo