auctex: FAQ
A.4 Frequently Asked Questions
==============================
1. Something is not working correctly. What should I do?
Well, you might have guessed it, the first place to look is in the
available documentation packaged with AUCTeX. This could be the
release notes (in the 'RELEASE' file) or the news section of the
manual in case you are experiencing problems after an upgrade, the
'INSTALL' file in case you are having problems with the
installation, the section about bugs in the manual in case you
encountered a bug or the relevant sections in the manual for other
related problems.
If this did not help, you can send a bug report to the AUCTeX bug
reporting list by using the command 'M-x TeX-submit-bug-report
RET'. But before you do this, you can try to get more information
about the problem at hand which might also help you locate the
cause of the error yourself.
First, you can try to generate a so-called backtrace which shows
the functions involved in a program error. In order to do this,
start Emacs with the command line 'emacs --debug-init' and/or put
the line
(setq debug-on-error t)
as the first line into your init file. After Emacs has started,
you can load a file which triggers the error and a new window
should pop up showing the backtrace. If you get such a backtrace,
please include it in the bug report.
Second, you can try to figure out if something in your personal or
site configuration triggers the error by starting Emacs without
such customizations. You can do this by invoking Emacs with the
command line 'emacs -q -no-site-file -l auctex'. The '-l' option
'auctex.el' which you normally do in your init file. After you
have started Emacs like this, you can load the file triggering the
error. If everything is working now, you know that you have to
search either in the site configuration file or your personal init
file for statements related to the problem.
2. What versions of Emacs are supported?
AUCTeX was tested with GNU Emacs 24. Older versions may work but
are unsupported.
3. What should I do when './configure' does not find programs like
latex?
This is problem often encountered on Windows. Make sure that the
'PATH' environment variable includes the directories containing the
relevant programs, as described in 
(auctex)Installation under
MS Windows.
4. Why doesn't the completion, style file, or multi-file stuff work?
It must be enabled first, insert this in your init file:
(setq-default TeX-master nil)
(setq TeX-parse-self t)
(setq TeX-auto-save t)
Read also the chapters about parsing and multifile documents in the
manual.
5. Why doesn't 'TeX-save-document' work?
'TeX-check-path' has to contain "./" somewhere.
6. Why is the information in 'foo.tex' forgotten when I save
'foo.bib'?
For various reasons, AUCTeX ignores the extension when it stores
information about a file, so you should use unique base names for
your files. E.g. rename 'foo.bib' to 'foob.bib'.
7. Why doesn't AUCTeX signal when processing a document is done?
If the message in the minibuffer stays "Type 'C-c C-l' to display
results of compilation.", you probably have a misconfiguration in
your init file ('.emacs', 'init.el' or similar). To track this
down either search in the '*Messages*' buffer for an error message
or put '(setq debug-on-error t)' as the first line into your init
file, restart Emacs and open a LaTeX file. Emacs will complain
loudly by opening a debugging buffer as soon as an error occurs.
The information in the debugging buffer can help you find the cause
of the error in your init file.
8. Why does 'TeX-next-error' ('C-c `') fail?
If 'TeX-file-line-error' is set to nil (not the default), these
sort of failures might be related to the the fact that when writing
the log file, TeX puts information related to a file, including
error messages, between a pair of parentheses. In this scenario
AUCTeX determines the file where the error happened by parsing the
log file and counting the parentheses. This can fail when there
are other, unbalanced parentheses present.
Activating so-called file:line:error messages for the log file
usually solves this issue, as these kind of messages are are easier
to parse; however, they may lack some details. Activation can be
done either in the configuration of your TeX system (consult its
manual to see where this is) or by simply keeping the variable
'TeX-file-line-error' to the default value of non-nil.
9. What does AUC stand for?
AUCTeX came into being at Aalborg University in Denmark. Back then
the Danish name of the university was Aalborg Universitetscenter;
AUC for short.
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