Re: PDF breaks emacs (PDF-Tools)

[Tassilo Horn]

torys.anderson@gmail.com (Tory S. Anderson) writes:

Hi Tory,

> I've been giving emacs PDF-Tools (very poorly documented here:
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PdfTools) a try and have been
> thoroughly impressed.  For the majority of my needs I'm even willing
> to switch from the system pdf viewer (the excellent Okular) to this
> one.

Huh?  The pdftools.el you've linked has no support for viewing PDFs.
What it can do is save a buffer or region as a PDF file.  That's all.

So is it possible that you are actually opening PDF files from within
emacs and then view them using Emacs' built-in `doc-view-mode'?

> But then, just when life is getting rosy, my faith is completely
> undermined by a PDF that not only refuses to open, but causes all of
> emacs to crash terribly. The daring user of PDF-Tools can try such a
> file here: http://orys.us/breaksemacspdf

I've just downloaded and opened that file with Emacs (current Git
version and also 24.4) and it worked without any problem.

> I have not identified what causes the problem; other PDFs with image
> components or side-runners don't seem to be problematic, nor are PDFs
> of hundreds (even thousands) of pages in length. But if emacs crashes
> here, I'm not sure where else it may fail. Any suggestions? Otherwise,
> be warned.
>
> Note: by "crash" I mean, utterly and indefinitely freezes without
> warning or complaint.

Well, then that's no crash. ;-)

I guess you did try to hit `C-g' repeatedly to see if that breaks the
freeze, right?

Otherwise, it's a bit hard to debug from my side.  I see you use Emacs
24.3.  I don't have that available right now but you could try upgrading
to 24.4 and check if the freeze occurs there, too.

Bye,
Tassilo