Re: Macros expanded in Org buffer

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye) writes:

> Aloha all,
>
> I'm not sure how this happened, but chapter 2 of orgmanual now has all
> the macros replaced by their expansions.  You can see this here:
>
> https://github.com/tsdye/orgmanual/blob/master/orgmanual.org

Apologies for the brief post earlier.  I discovered this an hour before
guests arrived for a dinner I was supposed to be cooking ...

Here is what I was doing prior to discovering that all the macros in
chapter 2 had been replaced by their expansions.

I had been working on description lists throughout the document and had
inadvertently left two blank lines in the middle of a list. The error
this raises is something along the lines of "incorrect argument stringp,
nil" and I haven't found an easy way to discover from this where the error
occurs in the Org buffer.

The method I've been using is a variant of one Nick Dokos suggested some
years ago in the context of a different problem, and which he called
bisecting.  What I do, is export one subtree at a time until I find a
subtree that doesn't export, then I do this on subtrees of that subtree
until I have isolated a reasonably-sized search space.  

In this instance, once I discovered that chapter 2 had the error, I used
toggle-debug-on-error, turned asynchronous export off, and exported
chapter 2 to see the debug information.  This pointed me in the right
direction and I was able to find the problem and fix it.

I don't know where in this sequence of events the macros were replaced
by their expansion, but I feel certain that it happened during this work
because the problem is confined only to chapter 2.

I hope this helps.  Let me know if you have questions.

All the best,
Tom

-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com