Hi,
I have already submitted to auctex-devel some patches to cope with window management: AucTeX currently is very aggressive in creating windows how it wants to, and overriding the behavior of Emacs' different window managers. I really would appreciate some feedback.
However, my current concern now is with logging and I see that I was until recently using a very old installation and that now AucTeX uses -file-line-error. This probably simplifies AucTeX's search for files but has the unwanted consequence that error descriptors are actually not output by pdftex, but remain hidden in the log file.
An example would be a file I attach. You will see that the log output is pretty verbose and it contains the information we need for the actual TeX Help buffer
! Undefined control sequence.
<recently read> \fractu
l.8 ...oo is foo-ndamental. This is wrong $\fractu
$.
? X
However, if we invoke pdftex with -file-line-error, what we get is something like
...
foo.tex:8: Undefined control sequence
[1{C:/Users/juanj/AppData/Local/MiKTeX/2.9/pdftex/config/pdftex.map}] (foo.aux) )
...
which is less informative and less useful for the user. Actually, the TeX-error-overview and the next-error commands do not give any useful information at all. I have checked this in other installations of LaTeX and the problem is still there. In general there seems to be a chaos in the conventions used
* pdflatex -file-line-error: shows file name and line number, no useful information
* pdflatex or lualatex alone: shows line number, provides context
* lualatex -file-line-error: provides context together with file name and line number
...
It seems hard to find a consensus. I tried also on Linux and there is not much difference. Would it make sense to code some saner defaults in AucTeX? Does -file-line-error really improve so much AucTeX's search for error messages?
Note: as to why I insist so much on this, I have to work with visual-line-mode set to t, because that is how most of my colleagues work. If AucTeX does not provide context for an error message, line number information is not that much useful in such a situation, where a line may span a whole paragraph.
Juanjo
--
foo.tex