7.2 Troubleshooting

• Q. Why can't I enter a password on pages which require authentication?

  Make sure the w3m-async-exec variable is set to a value other than nil.

• Q. Why can't I enter a password for a proxy server which requires authentication?

  Make sure the w3m-async-exec variable is set to a value other than nil.

• Q. Why can't I follow links?

  Emacs-w3m requires a version of w3m which recognizes the `-header' option. Check what version of w3m you use.

• Q. Why do garbage characters appear?

  It could be caused by the following reasons:

  1. Bad HTML file

     If the character set specified by the `<meta>' tag differs from the actual contents in an HTML file, it will not be displayed correctly. Use the command M-x w3m-redisplay-with-charset or C c to set the correct character set and to force redisplay of the page.

  2. Limitation of the character sets

     A page written by a character set other than ISO-2022-JP(jis), EUC-JP, or SHIFT_JIS may not be displayed correctly. Try one of the following ways:

     1. Any characters defined in Unicode will be displayed correctly if you install the Mule-UCS package (see section 2.3 Things required to run emacs-w3m). You need to make sure that the value of the w3m-use-mule-ucs variable is set to a value other than nil after installing the Mule-UCS package. In addition, if you want to make Emacs (and also emacs-w3m) handle the character sets EUC-JISX0213 and ISO-2022-JP-3, you have to install the `jisx0213' module which is contained in the Mule-UCS package (though it doesn't work under XEmacs unfortunately).

     2. Install w3mmee or w3m-m17n, and set the w3m-command variable to the appropriate value. And emacs-w3m will use the multi-lingual features provided by one of those programs. However, a page written by a coding system which Emacs doesn't support may not be displayed correctly. So please install Mule-UCS package if necessary.

  3. Emacsen incompatibility

     Under XEmacs 21.1, pages written by the SHIFT_JIS character set may not be displaied correctly. There is also a problem in XEmacs 21.2 prior to the beta 36 version. You should upgrade your XEmacs if you use such one.

     You should notice that XEmacs versions 21.1 and 21.2 have already been retired officially.

  4. Don't use standard-display-european

     It is generally harmful since it often makes Latin characters get displayed incorrectly. For instance, the apostrophe character (`'') which was encoded as `&#8217' will be displayed as the character `u' with a grave accent as if it had been encoded as `&#249'. If the line something like the following is in your `~/.emacs' file or site files which Emacs loads when starting up, we strongly recommend you to remove it.

     (standard-display-european 1)

     There the argument might be t, not 1.

• Q. Why can't images be shown?

  It could be caused by the following reasons:

  There is a bug in the earlier versions of the `libungif' library. You have to install `libungif-4.1.0b1' and later.

  You must install the `gifsicle' program if you want to run emacs-w3m under XEmacs. See section 2.3 Things required to run emacs-w3m.

  Emacs-w3m doesn't support the old versions of w3m. Check what version of w3m you use.

• Q. Why can't I browse pages which require cookies?

  (This is still an experimental feature.)

  Make sure the w3m-use-cookies variable is set to a value other than nil.

• Q. Why can't I fill in the form?

  (This is still an experimental feature.)

  Make sure the w3m-use-form variable is set to a value other than nil.

• Q. Why can't I submit a form?

  (This is still an experimental feature.)

  Make sure the w3m-use-form variable is set to a value other than nil. You also need to use a version of w3m which recognizes the `-post' option in order to use this function. Check what version of w3m you use.

• Q. Why are frames not rendered?

  Install w3mmee and put the following line in your `~/.emacs' file:

  (setq w3m-command "w3mmee")

• Q. Why are favicon images not displayed in the Emacs 21 tab bar?

  Install the `convert' program which is included in ImageMagick. It is available from: http://www.imagemagick.org/

• Q. Why does Emacs 21 get locked when a favicon image is going to be displayed?
• Q. My computer accesses the disk drive violently and says `process convert exited abnormally with code 10'. What's the story?

  Do you use an old version of ImageMagick? As far as we know, it happens when you use the `convert' program bundled with ImageMagick 5.2.1. It has been confirmed that the `convert' program bundled with ImageMagick 5.4.0-5 (and later) works fine.

  If you don't want to use ImageMagick, or if you can't use its most recent version, add the following line in your `~/.emacs-w3m' file:

  (setq w3m-use-favicon nil)

• Q. Why does not emacs-w3m work with w3mmee?

  If you are using w3mmee configured with the option `lang=en' or `lang=ja', reconfigure w3mmee with the option `lang=many' (it can be done by entering 3, when the `configure' script prompts you, "Which language do you prefer?"), and rebuild w3mmee.

• Q. Why I cannot visit web pages using emacs-w3m? There is no problem when visiting local html files or using w3m barefoot, though.

  What is called the asynch patch(5) is applied to the w3m command which some Linux distribution (e.g. Gentoo Linux) contains. It is useful when using w3m barefoot, however it might make emacs-w3m hang. If it is suspected, we recommend you reinstall the w3m command from the original source.