Re: problem with font lock

["Jose A. Ortega Ruiz" <jao@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> writes:

> Once it's done it's too late.  But you can (setq font-lock-support-mode
> nil) in your .emacs and then try to reproduce the problem.  This should
> (well, may) give you a usable error message right when the
> problem appears.

Although setting font-lock-support-mode to nil (and debug-on-error
active) didn't trigger an error, i think i've located the origin of the
problem. i have a little DSL for specifying faces for custom themes, and
i was setting one of the faces to a non-sensical value (concretely, the
face was fringe, and i was setting its :foreground to a list specifiying
a full face, instead of just a color or similar). upon correcting the
face specification and re-enabling my custom theme, the buffers that had
lost their real-time fontification recovered it instantaneously. maybe
someone privy to font-lock will understand why a bogus face
specification would have such a global effect. (BTW, the problem was
also occurring in emacs 23.1.1.)

Thanks!
jao