Release notes for AUCTeX 11.54
==============================

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
-------------------------------------------

AUCTeX 11.54 is mainly a bug-fix release which takes care of problems
introduced by new features in the 11.5x series, like the overlays-at
bug in XEmacs and some performance issues with font locking and
filling, but also other, long-standing issues, like broken
fontification of verbatim environments.

Besides bug-fixes some new features crept in.  Font locking can now be
customized to a great extent and support for the LaTeX packages url,
listings, jurabib and csquotes was added.  The parser now understands
additional commands common in LaTeX packages and classes, like
\DeclareRobustCommand.

Two new sections were added to the manual.  The section "Quick Start"
gives a short introduction for beginners and serves as a starting
point for diving into the more sophisticated chapters of the manual
once one is acquainted with the basic workings of AUCTeX.  The section
"Font Locking" describes syntax highlighting in AUCTeX and its
customization options.

IMPORTANT: Many of the new features in the 11.5x series rely on
special properties in the variable `TeX-command-list' and will not
work if you customized this variable for a pre-11.5x 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 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 <URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex/>.
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
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/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
<URL:http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net/> 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 <mailto:dak@gnu.org>.  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, Miguel Frasson, 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.)