Texmacs crashes on export: How to debug

#1

Hello everyone. I have a texmacs file that crashes TeXmacs (at least on Windows) when I try to export to PDF.

Editing the file works well. Exporting the file to LaTeX works well. Exporting to PDF crashes.

I have do not know how to provide any information about debugging because Texmacs does not provide anything. It just closes! I tried running it from the console, but no messages appear.

Could you tell me how to debug the file?

I would not want to share it indiscriminately since it is a paper, I am working on, but I would gladly send it for debugging to a developer.

Things that I have tried:

  • Erasing my texmacs configuration directory
  • Creating a new file and copy pasting the entire file

Result: Crashes still occur!!

Also, is it normal that Texmacs provides no information on crashes? Maybe I am not looking somewhere important? I had some other crashes happen to me e.g. when working with the bibliography. Sometimes I had fixed everything by clearing the cache. I would have liked to file a report but I cannot find instructions on how analyze crashes. Please advise.

Some theories on the problem

I think the file might have gotten somehow messed up because I tried playing around with semantic math but interrupted the procedure half-way.

Editing the file works well though there were some occasions on which TeXmacs crashed when selecting some math expressions. I fixed it by just straight-out deleting math displays and retyping them. Unfortunately, I did not have time to debug because I had to finish the draft for collaborators.

It seems that that the current situation is related to this.

Thank you in advance!

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#2

I have an update. The crash is related to a long table that doesn’t fit on one page. I am editing the document in papyrus mode and I had a large table. I manage to make Texmacs crash also when switching from papyrus to paper layout. Furthermore, I managed sometimes to reproduce the bug in other documents: I copy and pasted the table and it sometimes makes the new document crash (though not always).

For now I fixed my issue by splitting the table into multiple parts

If someone wants to take a look at the file or if I can provide more details, I would be happy to!

#3

Maybe for such a thing it could make sense writing an email to @vdhoeven, the official email is at http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/authors.en.html or I think you may contact at the email (still in the texmacs.org domain) he writes from in the mailing list.

By the way the debugging messages in Windows are not sent to the terminal, I noticed it as well. On Linux they are and I assume on MacOS too.

#4

I have been planning to spin up a VM with linux so I can debug most things I report here there, too!

#5

I haven’t been able to reproduce this with a long table on Linux. I’d be happy to test a file if you could provide one.

I believe on Windows you can output some debug info by adding something like -log-file debug.log on the console. There is also a console window you can activate from inside TeXmacs, but that’s of limited use in case of a crash.

A bug report should be the best way to keep track of a problem like this.

#6

Could you provide the long table which crashes GNU TeXmacs with privacy info removed here on the forum and on this thread?

I’d like to fix it (as one of the TeXmacs developer).

#7

Thank you @darcy and @jeroen! I apologize for the delay. Here is the bug report I filed:

GNU TeXmacs - Bugs: bug #62844, Crash on PDF export of large table… [Savannah]

The attached file with practically only the table is there.

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