#1598 Cannot open PDF using displayline

[Jason Alexander]

When I attempt to view a PDF in Skim, launching it via the command below, from Emacs, I get an error message. The command is:

/Applications/Skim.app/Contents/SharedSupport/displayline -b -g 105 letter.pdf letter.tex

The error message is:

88:93: syntax error: A identifier can’t go after this “"”. (-2740)

The error message occurs even if I drop the '-b' and '-g' flags.

[Christiaan Hofman]

Strange, I cannot reproduce this problem. And nothing has changed for a while. I also see nothing wrong with the script. Did you actually use these file names, or were you using different file names with special characters?

[Christiaan Hofman]

Also, does it also occur if you don't add the .tex file argument?

[Christiaan Hofman]

Also, could it be that there is a special character (perhaps a doubl-quote) in the full path to the file?

[Jason Alexander]

That was the problem — the full path to the directory containing the LaTeX file I was editing had a double-quote in it. Removing that fixed the problem.

Apologies for the misguided bug report!

J

On 4 Feb 2026, at 15:43, Christiaan Hofman hofman@users.sourceforge.net wrote:

Also, could it be that there is a special character (perhaps a doubl-quote) in the full path to the file?

---

[bugs:#1598]https://sourceforge.net/p/skim-app/bugs/1598/ Cannot open PDF using displayline

Status: open-works-for-me
Group: Other
Created: Wed Feb 04, 2026 02:12 PM UTC by Jason Alexander
Last Updated: Wed Feb 04, 2026 03:14 PM UTC
Owner: nobody

When I attempt to view a PDF in Skim, launching it via the command below, from Emacs, I get an error message. The command is:

/Applications/Skim.app/Contents/SharedSupport/displayline -b -g 105 letter.pdf letter.tex

The error message is:

88:93: syntax error: A identifier can’t go after this “"”. (-2740)

The error message occurs even if I drop the '-b' and '-g' flags.

---

Sent from sourceforge.net because you indicated interest in https://sourceforge.net/p/skim-app/bugs/1598/

To unsubscribe from further messages, please visit https://sourceforge.net/auth/subscriptions/

[Christiaan Hofman]

The displayline script in the next release will allow double-quotes in the file paths.