Release notes for AUCTeX 11.53 ============================== AUCTeX provides by far the most wide-spread and sophisticated environment for editing LaTeX, TeX, ConTeXt and Texinfo documents with Emacs or XEmacs. 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 during entry. Interfaces in this release remain a moving target with the documentation lagging somewhat. We need volunteers in particular for non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material, sleuth work, testing. New features and fixed bugs in this release ------------------------------------------- Another bug in connection with XEmacs and PDF modes has been uncovered. GTK versions of GNU Emacs will now use Unicode characters in the LaTeX math menu. No other platforms are affected. The installation process tries to detect a few more things automatically. 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. Many such changes can be avoided by using other customization variables. Requirements ------------ It is required 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. For XEmacs, 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: please use the XEmacs package system for upgrading if necessary. The current developers don't have the resources for providing backward compatibility to earlier versions. Availability ------------ AUCTeX can be downloaded from . There are tarballs, and RPMs for Fedora and SuSE (for Emacs). A separate directory contains some stuff from the tarball, such as ChangeLog, printable manuals, a reference sheet. The download area is mirrored to the directory support/auctex on CTAN. AUCTeX is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. You'll find more information at the web site of AUCTeX , including its mailing list address. 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. 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 series (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 accept our apologies if we forgot somebody).