AUCTeX-11.50
The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has
been posted to comp.text.tex,comp.emacs,comp.emacs.xemacs as well.
After a lot of development, AUCTeX-11.50 has been finally
released. It has been uploaded to ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex
and is available there in the files
auctex-11.50.tar.gz
auctex-11.50-1.noarch.rpm
auctex-11.50-1.src.rpm
auctex-11.50.zip
The appended release notes can also be found in RELEASE-11.50
there, and some pregenerated files can be found in the 11.50-extra
directory for convenience (README, change files, manual and
reference sheet in PDF and PS form). [Note to CTAN: It would
probably be easiest to mirror the ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex
directory to CTAN:support/auctex; if you want a separate upload,
please tell me so.]
AUCTeX is licenced under the GPL.
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 <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.
You’ll find more information at the web site of AUCTeX <URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex>,
including its mailing list address.
Current project manager is David Kastrup <URL: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 (in
alphabetical order): Ralf Angeli, Masayuki Ataka, Thomas Baumann,
Berend de Boer, Peter S. Galbraith, Patrick Gundlach, Yvon Hevel,
David Kastrup, Frank K., J. Larsson, Dan Nicolaescu, Piet van
Oostrum, Davide G. M. Salvetti, Mike Sperber, Reiner Steib,
Christian Schlauer, Shiro Takeda (Please apologize if we forgot
somebody.)
—
David Kastrup