Hi Ihor,

The hook that is going wrong is pdf-tools-enable-minor-modes.

After digging into it, there seems to be a whole bunch of problematic minor
modes. My methodology wasn't super rigorous, but what I found was
> pdf-misc-context-menu-minor-mode
> pdf-misc-size-indication-minor-mode
> pdf-misc-menu-bar-minor-mode
> pdf-misc-minor-mode
cause problems every time the pdf is loaded, and
> pdf-links-minor-mode
> pdf-outline-minor-mode
> pdf-annot-minor-mode
cause problems every *other* time the pdf is loaded.

I found a couple of workarounds: adding (org-reload) to my init.el
(actually config.el as I'm running doom emacs) solves the problem, though
it does add another second to my load time. Alternatively, I was able to
load the first set of minor modes without issue by using doom's (after!
pdf-tools ...). This didn't seem to work for the latter minor modes though.

Cheers,
Sam

On Wed, 29 Dec 2021 at 05:01, Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> wrote:

> Samuel Crawford <sam.crawford@york.ac.uk> writes:
>
> > Every time I try to open a particular pdf I'm inundated with "Org parser
> > error"s, all looking like this:
> >
> >>  Warning (org-element-cache): org-element--cache: Org parser error in
> > thesis.pdf::316345. Resetting.
> >>  The error was: (error "rx ‘**’ range error")
> >
> > Is there any way I can disable org-element-cache on pdfs as a
> > workaround?
>
> AFAIU, something is calling org-mode function outside of org-mode (which
> is wrong, even though it could work by accident in earlier versions of
> Org). Can you check your hooks ran when you load the problematic pdf?
>
> Best,
> Ihor
>