[AUCTeX] AUCTeX 11.83 released

[David Kastrup]

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.  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
<URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex/>.  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
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/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
<URL:mailto:address@hidden> 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]  <URL:ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/preview/>

[2]  You can get a precompiled version of CVS Emacs for Windows e.g. at
<URL:http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html>.  A version with
AUCTeX preinstalled can be found at
<URL:ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/auctex/>.

[3]  Precompiled versions of Emacs for Mac OS X can be found e.g. at
<URL:http://yaced.sf.net/> (including AUCTeX) and
<URL:http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html>.

[4]  Debian provides precompiled GTK+ Emacs packages in its `unstable'
distribution (look for `emacs-snapshot-gtk').  Packages for Fedora can
be found at <URL:http://people.redhat.com/petersen/emacs/>.

[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
<URL:http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=emacs>

[6]  dvipng is available via its project page
<URL:http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/dvipng> and from CTAN.


-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum