This file describes various problems that have been encountered
in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
+* Underlines appear at the wrong position.
+
+This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
+An example is the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1. To
+circumvent this problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to
+nil in your .emacs.
+
* Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
-Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.)
+Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
+uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
+"colors".
+
+In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
+``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
+back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
+use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
+doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
+sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
+it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
+capability).
+
+Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
+attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
+incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
+this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
-global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing`global-font-lock-mode'.
+global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
+`global-font-lock-mode'.
* Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
+Windows 2000 input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.1).
+These input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded in
+the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
+characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
+work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
+you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
+the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
+ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
+appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
+yet.)
+
+Multilingual text put into the Windows 2000 clipboard by Windows
+applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.1). This
+is because Windows 2000 uses Unicode to represent multilingual text,
+but Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it. This
+means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
+Windows 2000 programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
+Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
+set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.
+
* The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
* Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
-This was reported to happen when building Emacs on RedHat GNU/Linux
-using a build directory automounted from Solaris (SunOS 5.6) file
-server, but it might not be limited to that configuration alone.
-Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the files' data to disk
-quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is left ``busy'' for
-several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping itself. This causes
-the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped Emacs excutable to
-fail with the above message.
+This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
+(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
+(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
+configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
+files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
+left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
+itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
+Emacs excutable to fail with the above message.
In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
-* The W3 package (either from from the CVS sources or the last
-release) currently (2000-12-14) doesn't run properly with Emacs 21 and
-needs work. This patch is reported to make w3-4.0pre.46 work:
+* The latest released version of the W3 package doesn't run properly
+with Emacs 21 and needs work. However, these problems are already
+fixed in W3's CVS. This patch is reported to make w3-4.0pre.46 work:
diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el
--- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el Sun Nov 14 22:00:12 1999
a vector of the actual parameter values, written as equations:
@cite{[a = 3, b = 2]}, in case you'd rather read them in a list
than pick them out of the formula. (You can type @kbd{t y}
-! to move this vector to the stack; @pxref{Trail Commands})
+! to move this vector to the stack; @pxref{Trail Commands}.)
Specifying a different independent variable name will affect the
resulting formula: @kbd{a F 1 k RET} produces @kbd{3 + 2 k}.
Specifying a different independent variable name will affect the
resulting formula: @kbd{a F 1 k RET} produces @kbd{3 + 2 k}.
+* Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.
+
+As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified. This means that
+characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
+etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
+different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
+which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
+encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
+text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
+into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
+buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.
+
+To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.
+
* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
and the default CFLAGS.
+* Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
+
+If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
+representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
+ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux 2.4.3
+with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other systems as well. To
+avoid this problem, switch to using the standard ftp client. On a
+Debian system, type
+
+ update-alternatives --config ftpd
+
+and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
+
* On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
* When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
-This can happen if you compiled Ispell to use ASCII characters only
-and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII characters,
-specifically Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
-Latin-1 support.
+This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
+characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
+characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
+support for 8-bit characters.
+
+To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
+this at your shell's prompt:
+
+ ispell -vv
+
+and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
+"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
+does not.
-This can also happen if the version of Ispell installed on your
-machine is old.
+To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
+in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
+Then rebuild the speller.
+
+Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
+version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
+
+Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
+in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
+Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
+it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
+spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
* On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
incorrect library functions.
+* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
+
+If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
+Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
+program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
+config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
+the front of your PATH environment variable.
+
* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
like make-docfile.