Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 10:42:50 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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To: Daniel Barker <sokal AT holyrood DOT ed DOT ac DOT uk>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: EMACS, Invalid Page Exception, Windows 98
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On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Daniel Barker wrote:

> > On going to "Clean Up Entry" from the BiBTeX-Edit menu in bibtex-mode of
> > DJGPP GNU EMACS 19.34, I got an invalid page exception message. The
> > error was not trapped by Dr Watson, which I have running from start-up.
> > The message told me to quit all applications and re-start the computer.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> In two more attempts to perform the operation, I have crashed EMACS once
> and Windows once.

This is a known problem with BibTeX and the regular expression
handling in Emacs 19.34: BibTeX sometimes generates complicated
regexps that blow up the runtime stack (not only in the DJGPP version
of Emacs).  Later versions of Emacs limit the stack usage in regexps
to a value that depends on what the runtime environment supports, so
the catastrophy is avoided, and BibTeX mode was rewritten to avoid
such complex regexps.

However, there is no precompiled binaries of newer versions of Emacs,
so if you want to upgrade, you will need to download the sources and
build it yourself (which is not too hard if you already have GCC
installed).

A workaround would be to bump up the Emacs stack size:

	stubedit emacs.exe minstack=1024k

This won't make the problem go away entirely, but it will allow you to
edit more complex BibTeX files without crashing.  If you have lots of
memory on your machine, and you use BibTeX a lot, use 2048k or even
4096k instead of 1024k.