The core emacs lisp libraries are riddled with strings that are erroneously treated as docstrings in dump mode, which causes problems in the build when, say, format gets a 0 as its template string in a macro expansion. There are a few possible fixes I see, I'm not sure which is most likely to be accepted. 1) Change every non-docstring that starts with and explicit escaped newline to start with \n instead (there are a lot of them) 2) Change read_literal_string in lread.c to respect the setting of the dynamic-docstring setting the way the byte compiler does, and change all the lisp files not in loadup.el to set it to nil 3) Like 2, but make the default setting of dynamic-docstring nil and either set it as a local variable in the files in loadup, or set it in loadup when dump-mode is set 4) Make a special read syntax for literal docstrings, e.g. #", and do away with the weird context-sensitive semantics of ordinary string literals altogether. Also, the test in read_literal_string should probably be for "will_dump_p" rather than the purify flag, since it's the dumping that prompts the deferral of docstring loading, not the identification of constants. Any preferences? Lynn