Release notes for AUCTeX 11.50 ============================== AUCTeX provides by far the most wide-spread and sophisticated environment for editing LaTeX, TeX, ConTeXt and Texinfo documents with Emacs or XEmacs. When combined with packages like RefTeX, preview-latex, flyspell and others, it is pretty much without peer as a comprehensive authoring solution for a large variety of operating system platforms and TeX distributions. It supports document-dependent completion and syntax highlighting, easily accessible menus, jumping to error locations in the source file, a number of editing shortcuts, and intelligent indentation and filling of the text while you enter it. Documentation and interfaces in this release are still a moving target, partly due to a lack of volunteers for non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material, sleuth work, testing. The usual ``volunteers welcome'' applies here. Nevertheless, we strongly recommend using this release over the last one: the number of bugs has quite decreased, and usability is strikingly superior. New features and fixed bugs in this release ------------------------------------------- PDFTeX is being supported with a new mode that can be toggled with C-c C-t C-p, and the appropriate viewer gets selected depending on the generated output file type. Current versions of preview-latex will respect AUCTeX's PDF mode. Inverse and forward search work out of the box with viewers supporting Source Specials. Their use can be toggled with C-c C-t C-s and is made more convenient by the new C-c C-v viewer shortcut. For inverse search, emacsclient or gnuclient are used if available. Authors of LaTeX class and style files previously were not able to make much use of AUCTeX. Mostly due to the work of Ralf Angeli, creating style files is supported with syntax highlighting, a highly sophisticated completely rewritten engine for keeping indentation and environments in .dtx files consistent in both documentation and code sections, additional macro completions for programmer commands and a few other goodies. ConTeXt is a supported format now. Syntax highlighting has become smarter and supports sub- and superscripts. Headings are now fontified in a larger font. Display of LaTeX sources can now be further improved by hiding and auto-revealing TeX constructes like footnotes or citations. That means much of the distracting markup can be replaced by pre-defined strings or the content of the respective macros. The functionality is available via the "Show/Hide" menu entry or the respective key bindings (use C-c C-o C-h to get a list). The menus have been reorganized and cleaned up (and you'll see a few changes and additions in keybindings there), and the Command menu will now only offer commands relevant to the current major mode. A new autoconf-based installation makes configuring and installing AUCTeX a mostly automatic process, even under Windows. Read the files INSTALL or INSTALL.windows for instructions. Commenting and uncommenting now works correctly. AUCTeX now works around XEmacs issues with text formatting in connection with preview-latex. IMPORTANT: Many of the new features rely on special properties in the variable `TeX-command-list' and will not work if you customized this variable for a former release of AUCTeX. If this is the case for you, please re-initialize the variable by erasing the customization, thereby setting the variable to the new default, and re-adding your changes afterwards. Requirements ------------ It is recommended that you use at least GNU Emacs 21 or XEmacs 21.4 with AUCTeX. Support for Emacs 20 has been dropped in favor of getting more important work done. Unfortunately, just before release it has come to our attention that you need at least version 1.84 of the xemacs-base package (released on 01/27/2004) or a sumo tarball dated 02/02/2004 or newer for compiling AUCTeX because of non-trivial changes in easy-mmode.el. Providing backward compatibility to earlier versions would require resources we don't have right now: none of the currently active developers actually uses XEmacs. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope that you can make use of the XEmacs package system to upgrade if necessary. Future development and additional information --------------------------------------------- AUCTeX is proceeding as a GNU project with the long-term intent of merging it into Emacs (and merging with preview-latex probably next year). For that reason, all new contributors need to assign copyright to their contributions to the FSF (the usual procedure for Emacs contributors). The same holds for past contributors. The principal authors and maintainers have already done so, but it would require a diligent and diplomatic volunteer to find and ask the rest. You'll find more information at the web site of AUCTeX , including its mailing list address. Current project manager is David Kastrup . While Paypal contributions are appreciated, volunteering for tasks remains the most effective way of helping AUCTeX development. The following people contributed to this release (in alphabetical order): Ralf Angeli, Masayuki Ataka, Thomas Baumann, Berend de Boer, Peter S. Galbraith, Patrick Gundlach, Yvon Hevel, David Kastrup, Frank Küster, Jan-Ċke Larsson, Dan Nicolaescu, Piet van Oostrum, Davide G. M. Salvetti, Mike Sperber, Reiner Steib, Christian Schlauer, Shiro Takeda (Please apologize if we forgot somebody.)