AUCTeX

Release notes for AUCTeX 11.83 with preview-latex ================================================= AUCTeX provides by far the most wide-spread and sophisticated environment for editing LaTeX, TeX, ConTeXt and Texinfo documents with Emacs or XEmacs. ... [More] Combined with packages like RefTeX, 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, intelligent indentation and filling of text during entry, and WYSIWYG previews of graphical elements like math formulas right in the Emacs source buffer, by virtue of its preview-latex component. One part of the preview-latex subsystem is the central `preview.sty' file that is independently useful for a number of applications and is available in unbundled form from CTAN.[1] Interfaces and installation procedures in this release remain a moving target. If you feel you need to consult third-party installation instructions for some reason, be sure that they refer to the same version of AUCTeX as you are installing. For installing AUCTeX itself, the installation instructions in the AUCTeX package should be preferred. AUCTeX needs volunteers in particular for non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material, sleuth work, testing. New features and fixed bugs in this release ------------------------------------------- The new function `TeX-doc' provides easy access to documentation about commands and packages or information related to TeX and friends in general. It is accessible with the key binding `C-c ?' or the `Find Documentation...' entry in the mode menus. You can now get rid of generated intermediate and output files by means of the new `Clean' and `Clean All' entries in `TeX-command-list' accessible with `C-c C-c' or the Command menu. Support for forward search with PDF files was added. That means you can jump to a place in the output file corresponding to the position in the source file. Currently this only works if you use the pdfsync LaTeX package and xpdf as your PDF viewer. The accuracy is in the range of +/-1 page. Adding support for this feature required the default value of the variable `TeX-output-view-style' to be changed. Please make sure you either remove any customizations overriding the new default or incorporate the changes into your customizations if you want to use this feature. The error parsing of AUCTeX as well as preview-latex now deals with -file-line-error type messages from newer web2c versions (earlier versions would omit the traditional error context, which will not work). The LaTeX tool bar is now enabled by default. A problem in preview-latex in connection with XyMTeX has been fixed. IMPORTANT: Many of the new features in the 11.x 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. XEmacs requires 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: please use the XEmacs package system for upgrading if necessary. Warning: release 21.4.16 of XEmacs is severely broken. This leads to crashes and hangs; don't use it. The preview-latex subsystem requires image support. This is available with GNU Emacs 21.3 under the X window system. For Windows[2], MacOS Carbon[3] or native GTK+ toolkit support[4], a developer version[5] of GNU Emacs (to be released as 22.1) is definitely required. A recent developer version of GNU Emacs appears like the best choice even on X11, however. If you prefer XEmacs-21, it will work in version 21.4.10 or later. You'll also need a working LaTeX installation and Ghostscript. dvipng[6] (version 1.4 or later: teTeX-3.0 works, TeXlive2004 not), a very fast dvi converter, can be used to speed up the conversion. Availability ------------ AUCTeX can be downloaded in various formats from . At release time, we provide the source tarball, source and binary RPMs for Emacs under Fedora and SUSE, and a platform-independent XEmacs package file (which you have to install yourself using XEmacs' own package system, after using it for removing the previous version of AUCTeX). There are also RPMs just for installing the LaTeX part of preview (AUCTeX itself does not need them, but possibly other applications). The easiest way for using AUCTeX, of course, is using versions of Emacs that already include AUCTeX (check the footnotes below). RPMs with minor version 1 are built from the spec file in the tarball which should work on both SUSE as well as Fedora. The source RPMs should also work for rebuilding RPMs on other RPM-based distributions. (We have only tested SUSE and Fedora, though.) The XEmacs package file can be discerned by `pkg' in its name. It is usually more recent and functional than what gets distributed from XEmacs servers and as part of the Sumo tarball. A separate directory for each release contains some stuff from the tarball, such as ChangeLog, printable manuals, and 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 addresses. Future development and additional information --------------------------------------------- AUCTeX is proceeding as a GNU project with the long-term intent of merging it into Emacs. 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. Paypal contributions to gnu.org> would be appreciated in order to compensate for time, money and hardware required for presenting AUCTeX at conferences. Extensions may be commissioned: enquire on the developer list (see above). Other than that, 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, Arne Jørgensen, David Kastrup, Ikumi Keita, Frank Küster, Jan-Åke Larsson, Dan Nicolaescu, Piet van Oostrum, Davide G. M. Salvetti, Mike Sperber, Reiner Steib, Christian Schlauer, Shiro Takeda, Mark Trettin (Please accept our apologies if we forgot somebody.) Footnotes: [1] [2] You can get a precompiled version of CVS Emacs for Windows e.g. at . A version with AUCTeX preinstalled can be found at . [3] Precompiled versions of Emacs for Mac OS X can be found e.g. at (including AUCTeX) and . [4] Debian provides precompiled GTK+ Emacs packages in its `unstable' distribution (look for `emacs-snapshot-gtk'). Packages for Fedora can be found at . [5] If making use of the precompiled variants is not an option for you, instructions for checking out the CVS version straight from the GNU's mouth can be found at [6] dvipng is available via its project page and from CTAN. [Less]

The following release announcement has been posted to the auctex-devel list by Jan-Åke Larsson mai.liu.se>. dvipng has been designed with a focus of allowing it to be the main rendering engine for DVI files in AUCTeX's preview-latex (by ... [More] customizing `preview-image-type' to `dvipng'). Release notes for version 1.8 of the dvipng package: This program makes PNG graphics from DVI files as obtained from TeX and its relatives. The 1.8 release adds the possibility to include bitmapped images (PNG, JPEG, and GIF), and changes PostScript inclusion so that the image is not cropped to the boundingbox (unless requested) and has a transparent background. From now on, for performance reasons, the output image will be truecolor if an image is included. The output quality is substantially improved when using the Freetype font library. Freetype hinting has previously been disabled in dvipng (because of substandard output from the Computer Modern font), but from the 1.8 release onwards, hinting will be enabled in a mode that prefers shape over contrast (which works well with the Computer Modern font). In short, the output quality is visibly better when Freetype is available than when it isn't. The release also fixes a few bugs and enhances the internal color cache for better performance. [Less]

Hello, this is the last time this announcement is sent to the info-gnu list: if you want to be kept up to date about future releases of AUCTeX, subscribe to the info-auctex list which is a low-volume list used only for announcements. Information ... [More] about mailing lists for AUCTeX is available from its web site, see below. Release notes for AUCTeX 11.82 with preview-latex ================================================= 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, 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, intelligent indentation and filling of the text during entry, and WYSIWYG previews of graphical elements like math formulas right in the Emacs source buffer, by virtue of its preview-latex component. One part of the preview-latex subsystem is the central `preview.sty' file that is independently useful for a number of applications and is available in unbundled form from CTAN.[1] Interfaces and installation procedures in this release remain a moving target. If you feel you need to consult third-party installation instructions for some reason, be sure that they refer to the same version of AUCTeX as you are installing. For installing AUCTeX itself, the installation instructions in the AUCTeX package should be preferred. AUCTeX needs volunteers in particular for non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material, sleuth work, testing. New features and fixed bugs in this release ------------------------------------------- Processing of errors and warnings resulting from processor invocations was improved. That means BibTeX runs are now checked for warnings and errors, warnings and underfull/overfull boxes after a LaTeX run can be indicated in the echo area, and it is now possible to jump to warnings and bad boxes separately. In order to make typing sub- and superscript in math constructs more convenient, automatic brace insertion upon typing <^> or <_> can be activated. French quotation marks as supported by the `frenchb' or `francais' babel options can now be entered by simply typing <">. Completion support for options of some LaTeX packages was added. Various bug fixes happened as well. preview-latex can now be correctly installed with XEmacs. Unloading AUCTeX as described in the manual now works with Emacs 21. All tool bar images are displayed again with CVS Emacs. Line breaks inside of LaTeX macros with Japanese characters are now being prevented. Identification of math constructs is now aware of comments. People running Windows who used to load AUCTeX with `(require 'tex-mik)' now have to specify `(load "auctex.el" nil t t)' in addition because tex-mik.el no longer activates AUCTeX. More detailed information can be found in the CHANGES file included in the distribution or the "Changes" section in the manual. IMPORTANT: Many of the new features in the 11.x 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. XEmacs requires 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: please use the XEmacs package system for upgrading if necessary. Warning: release 21.4.16 of XEmacs is severely broken. This leads to crashes and hangs; don't use it. The preview-latex subsystem requires image support. This is available with GNU Emacs 21.3 under the X window system. For Windows[2], MacOS Carbon[3] or native GTK+ toolkit support[4], a developer version[5] of GNU Emacs (to be released as 22.1) is definitely required. A recent developer version of GNU Emacs appears like the best choice even on X11, however. If you prefer XEmacs-21, it will work in version 21.4.10 or later. You'll also need a working LaTeX installation and Ghostscript. dvipng[6] (version 1.4 or later: teTeX-3.0 works, TeXlive2004 not), a very fast dvi converter, can be used to speed up the conversion. Availability ------------ AUCTeX can be downloaded in various formats from . A separate directory contains some stuff from the tarball, such as ChangeLog, printable manuals, and 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. 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 to gnu.org> 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, Arne Jørgensen, David Kastrup, Ikumi Keita, Frank Küster, Jan-Åke Larsson, Dan Nicolaescu, Piet van Oostrum, Davide G. M. Salvetti, Mike Sperber, Reiner Steib, Christian Schlauer, Shiro Takeda, Mark Trettin (Please accept our apologies if we forgot somebody.) Footnotes: [1] [2] You can get a precompiled version of CVS Emacs for Windows at or . An experimental version with AUCTeX preinstalled can be found at . [3] contains build instructions. [4] Debian provides precompiled GTK+ Emacs packages in its `unstable' distribution (look for `emacs-snapshot-gtk'). Packages for Fedora can be found at . [5] If making use of the precompiled variants is not an option for you, instructions for checking out the CVS version straight from the GNU's mouth can be found at [6] dvipng is available via its project page and from CTAN. [Less]

Hello, this is the last time this announcement is sent to the info-gnu list: if you want to be kept up to date about future releases of AUCTeX, subscribe to the info-auctex list which is a low-volume list used only for announcements. Information ... [More] about mailing lists for AUCTeX is available from its web site, see below. Release notes for AUCTeX 11.82 with preview-latex ================================================= 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, 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, intelligent indentation and filling of the text during entry, and WYSIWYG previews of graphical elements like math formulas right in the Emacs source buffer, by virtue of its preview-latex component. One part of the preview-latex subsystem is the central `preview.sty' file that is independently useful for a number of applications and is available in unbundled form from CTAN.[1] Interfaces and installation procedures in this release remain a moving target. If you feel you need to consult third-party installation instructions for some reason, be sure that they refer to the same version of AUCTeX as you are installing. For installing AUCTeX itself, the installation instructions in the AUCTeX package should be preferred. AUCTeX needs volunteers in particular for non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material, sleuth work, testing. New features and fixed bugs in this release ------------------------------------------- Processing of errors and warnings resulting from processor invocations was improved. That means BibTeX runs are now checked for warnings and errors, warnings and underfull/overfull boxes after a LaTeX run can be indicated in the echo area, and it is now possible to jump to warnings and bad boxes separately. In order to make typing sub- and superscript in math constructs more convenient, automatic brace insertion upon typing <^> or <_> can be activated. French quotation marks as supported by the `frenchb' or `francais' babel options can now be entered by simply typing <">. Completion support for options of some LaTeX packages was added. Various bug fixes happened as well. preview-latex can now be correctly installed with XEmacs. Unloading AUCTeX as described in the manual now works with Emacs 21. All tool bar images are displayed again with CVS Emacs. Line breaks inside of LaTeX macros with Japanese characters are now being prevented. Identification of math constructs is now aware of comments. People running Windows who used to load AUCTeX with `(require 'tex-mik)' now have to specify `(load "auctex.el" nil t t)' in addition because tex-mik.el no longer activates AUCTeX. More detailed information can be found in the CHANGES file included in the distribution or the "Changes" section in the manual. IMPORTANT: Many of the new features in the 11.x 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. XEmacs requires 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: please use the XEmacs package system for upgrading if necessary. Warning: release 21.4.16 of XEmacs is severely broken. This leads to crashes and hangs; don't use it. The preview-latex subsystem requires image support. This is available with GNU Emacs 21.3 under the X window system. For Windows[2], MacOS Carbon[3] or native GTK toolkit support[4], a developer version[5] of GNU Emacs (to be released as 22.1) is definitely required. A recent developer version of GNU Emacs appears like the best choice even on X11, however. If you prefer XEmacs-21, it will work in version 21.4.10 or later. You'll also need a working LaTeX installation and Ghostscript. dvipng[6] (version 1.4 or later: teTeX-3.0 works, TeXlive2004 not), a very fast dvi converter, can be used to speed up the conversion. Availability ------------ AUCTeX can be downloaded in various formats from . A separate directory contains some stuff from the tarball, such as ChangeLog, printable manuals, and 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. 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 to gnu.org> 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, Arne Jørgensen, David Kastrup, Ikumi Keita, Frank Küster, Jan-Åke Larsson, Dan Nicolaescu, Piet van Oostrum, Davide G. M. Salvetti, Mike Sperber, Reiner Steib, Christian Schlauer, Shiro Takeda, Mark Trettin (Please accept our apologies if we forgot somebody.) Footnotes: [1] [2] You can get a precompiled version of CVS Emacs for Windows at or . An experimental version with AUCTeX preinstalled can be found at . [3] contains build instructions. [4] Debian provides precompiled GTK Emacs packages in its `unstable' distribution (look for `emacs-snapshot-gtk'). Packages for Fedora can be found at . [5] If making use of the precompiled variants is not an option for you, instructions for checking out the CVS version straight from the GNU's mouth can be found at [6] dvipng is available via its project page and from CTAN. [Less]

Release notes for AUCTeX 11.81 with preview-latex ================================================= AUCTeX provides by far the most wide-spread and sophisticated environment for editing LaTeX, TeX, ConTeXt and Texinfo documents with Emacs or XEmacs. ... [More] Combined with packages like RefTeX, 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, intelligent indentation and filling of the text during entry, and WYSIWYG previews of graphical elements like math formulas right in the Emacs source buffer, by virtue of its preview-latex component. One part of the preview-latex subsystem is the central `preview.sty' file that is independently useful for a number of applications and is available in unbundled form from CTAN.[1] Interfaces and installation procedures in this release remain a moving target. If you feel you need to consult third-party installation instructions for some reason, be sure that they refer to the same version of AUCTeX as you are installing. For installing AUCTeX itself, the installation instructions in the AUCTeX package should be preferred. AUCTeX needs volunteers in particular for non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material, sleuth work, testing. New features and fixed bugs in this release ------------------------------------------- The most important feature of AUCTeX 11.81 is the inclusion of the preview-latex subsystem, previously available separately. There is no documented provision for building or installing preview-latex separately. It is still possible to use and install AUCTeX without preview-latex, however. The installation procedures have been overhauled and now also install startup files as part of the process (those had to be copied manually previously). You are advised to remove previous installations of AUCTeX and preview-latex before starting the installation procedure. A standard installation from an unmodified tarball no longer requires Makeinfo or Perl. Other new features include support for commands of the babel package, generalization of language-specific quotation mark and hyphen insertion, and tooltips for folding mode. Of course, a lot of bugs have been fixed as well, such as problems with filling Japanese text. The encoding support of preview-latex has been further improved: it should be able to deal with most encoding systems including utf-8 transparently. More detailed information can be found in the CHANGES file included in the distribution or the "Changes" section in the manual. IMPORTANT: Many of the new features in the 11.x 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. XEmacs requires 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: please use the XEmacs package system for upgrading if necessary. Warning: release 21.4.16 of XEmacs is severely broken. This leads to crashes and hangs; don't use it. The preview-latex subsystem requires image support. This is available with GNU Emacs 21.3 under the X window system. For Windows[2], MacOS Carbon[3] or native GTK+ toolkit support[4], a developer version[5] of GNU Emacs (to be released as 22.1) is definitely required. A recent developer version of GNU Emacs appears like the best choice even on X11, however. If you prefer XEmacs-21, it will work in version 21.4.10 or later. You'll also need a working LaTeX installation and Ghostscript. dvipng[6] (version 1.4 or later: teTeX-3.0 works, TeXlive2004 not), a very fast dvi converter, can be used to speed up the conversion. Availability ------------ AUCTeX can be downloaded in various formats from . A separate directory contains some stuff from the tarball, such as ChangeLog, printable manuals, and 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. 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 to gnu.org> 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, Ikumi Keita, Frank Küster, Jan-Åke 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.) Footnotes: [1] [2] You can get a precompiled version of CVS Emacs for Windows at or . [3] contains build instructions. [4] Debian provides precompiled GTK+ Emacs packages in its `unstable' distribution (look for `emacs-snapshot-gtk'). Packages for Fedora can be found at . [5] If making use of the precompiled variants is not an option for you, instructions for checking out the CVS version straight from the GNU's mouth can be found at [6] dvipng is available via its project page and from CTAN. [Less]

Release notes for AUCTeX 11.81 with preview-latex ================================================= AUCTeX provides by far the most wide-spread and sophisticated environment for editing LaTeX, TeX, ConTeXt and Texinfo documents with Emacs or XEmacs. ... [More] Combined with packages like RefTeX, 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, intelligent indentation and filling of the text during entry, and WYSIWYG previews of graphical elements like math formulas right in the Emacs source buffer, by virtue of its preview-latex component. One part of the preview-latex subsystem is the central `preview.sty' file that is independently useful for a number of applications and is available in unbundled form from CTAN.[1] Interfaces and installation procedures in this release remain a moving target. If you feel you need to consult third-party installation instructions for some reason, be sure that they refer to the same version of AUCTeX as you are installing. For installing AUCTeX itself, the installation instructions in the AUCTeX package should be preferred. AUCTeX needs volunteers in particular for non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material, sleuth work, testing. New features and fixed bugs in this release ------------------------------------------- The most important feature of AUCTeX 11.81 is the inclusion of the preview-latex subsystem, previously available separately. There is no documented provision for building or installing preview-latex separately. It is still possible to use and install AUCTeX without preview-latex, however. The installation procedures have been overhauled and now also install startup files as part of the process (those had to be copied manually previously). You are advised to remove previous installations of AUCTeX and preview-latex before starting the installation procedure. A standard installation from an unmodified tarball no longer requires Makeinfo or Perl. Other new features include support for commands of the babel package, generalization of language-specific quotation mark and hyphen insertion, and tooltips for folding mode. Of course, a lot of bugs have been fixed as well, such as problems with filling Japanese text. The encoding support of preview-latex has been further improved: it should be able to deal with most encoding systems including utf-8 transparently. More detailed information can be found in the CHANGES file included in the distribution or the "Changes" section in the manual. IMPORTANT: Many of the new features in the 11.x 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. XEmacs requires 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: please use the XEmacs package system for upgrading if necessary. Warning: release 21.4.16 of XEmacs is severely broken. This leads to crashes and hangs; don't use it. The preview-latex subsystem requires image support. This is available with GNU Emacs 21.3 under the X window system. For Windows[2], MacOS Carbon[3] or native GTK toolkit support[4], a developer version[5] of GNU Emacs (to be released as 22.1) is definitely required. A recent developer version of GNU Emacs appears like the best choice even on X11, however. If you prefer XEmacs-21, it will work in version 21.4.10 or later. You'll also need a working LaTeX installation and Ghostscript. dvipng[6] (version 1.4 or later: teTeX-3.0 works, TeXlive2004 not), a very fast dvi converter, can be used to speed up the conversion. Availability ------------ AUCTeX can be downloaded in various formats from . A separate directory contains some stuff from the tarball, such as ChangeLog, printable manuals, and 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. 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 to gnu.org> 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, Ikumi Keita, Frank Küster, Jan-Åke 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.) Footnotes: [1] [2] You can get a precompiled version of CVS Emacs for Windows at or . [3] contains build instructions. [4] Debian provides precompiled GTK Emacs packages in its `unstable' distribution (look for `emacs-snapshot-gtk'). Packages for Fedora can be found at . [5] If making use of the precompiled variants is not an option for you, instructions for checking out the CVS version straight from the GNU's mouth can be found at [6] dvipng is available via its project page and from CTAN. [Less]