Text garbling

Text garbling

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Look at the exciting thing that happened to my Emacs this afternoon! A
few letters were switched out for other letters, and most numbers went
"off". This happened as I set off a list-package upgrade, switched away
to a different program, and then switched back.

https://ericabrahamsen.net/garbled.jpg

In that screenshot I'd done "C-u C-x =" on a capital "R", which was
displaying as a capital "P".

I'm running Emacs master on Arch linux, using the Wayland protocol with
the sway window manager.

Everything seemed to work fine (including input), just text displayed
wrong.

It went away after a restart. I guess I'd be surprised if the problem
came back, and I'm not really expecting any bug hunting here. But I
thought it might be useful to log what happened. Happy to provide any
other information of interest.

Eric

Re: Text garbling

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
> Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2020 18:30:53 -0700
> 
> Look at the exciting thing that happened to my Emacs this afternoon! A
> few letters were switched out for other letters, and most numbers went
> "off". This happened as I set off a list-package upgrade, switched away
> to a different program, and then switched back.
> 
> https://ericabrahamsen.net/garbled.jpg
> 
> In that screenshot I'd done "C-u C-x =" on a capital "R", which was
> displaying as a capital "P".
> 
> I'm running Emacs master on Arch linux, using the Wayland protocol with
> the sway window manager.
> 
> Everything seemed to work fine (including input), just text displayed
> wrong.
> 
> It went away after a restart. I guess I'd be surprised if the problem
> came back, and I'm not really expecting any bug hunting here. But I
> thought it might be useful to log what happened. Happy to provide any
> other information of interest.

My bet is on some "optimization" feature of your video driver that is
buggy.  Upgrading or downgrading that driver might help.

Re: Text garbling

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
>> Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2020 18:30:53 -0700
>> 
>> Look at the exciting thing that happened to my Emacs this afternoon! A
>> few letters were switched out for other letters, and most numbers went
>> "off". This happened as I set off a list-package upgrade, switched away
>> to a different program, and then switched back.
>> 
>> https://ericabrahamsen.net/garbled.jpg
>> 
>> In that screenshot I'd done "C-u C-x =" on a capital "R", which was
>> displaying as a capital "P".
>> 
>> I'm running Emacs master on Arch linux, using the Wayland protocol with
>> the sway window manager.
>> 
>> Everything seemed to work fine (including input), just text displayed
>> wrong.
>> 
>> It went away after a restart. I guess I'd be surprised if the problem
>> came back, and I'm not really expecting any bug hunting here. But I
>> thought it might be useful to log what happened. Happy to provide any
>> other information of interest.
>
> My bet is on some "optimization" feature of your video driver that is
> buggy.  Upgrading or downgrading that driver might help.

Yuck, I would never have suspected that the video driver could interfere
here. I think since switching to wayland I might just be able to remove
the xf86-video-intel package, that might have something to do with it.

Thanks,
Eric