Release notes for AUCTeX 11.84 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 -------------------------------------------
There have been problems with the `-without-texmf-dir' option to `configure' when the value of `-with-kpathsea-sep' was set or determined for an installation system with a default different from that of the runtime system. `with-kpathsea-sep' has been removed; the setting is now usually determined at runtime.
Due to this and other problems, preview-latex in the released XEmacs package failed under Windows or with anything except recent 21.5 XEmacsen.
AUCTeX and preview-latex have been changed in order to accommodate file names containing spaces. preview-latex now tolerates bad PostScript code polluting the stack (like some Omega fonts).
`preview.sty' had in some cases failed to emit PostScript header specials.
Support for folding of comments was added.
The `polish' language option of the babel LaTeX package as well as the `polski' LaTeX package are now supported. Most notably this means that AUCTeX will help to insert quotation marks as defined by polish.sty (`...') and polski.sty (,,...'').
There has been quite a number of bug fixes to various features and documentation across the board, most critical probably the tool bar.
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:auctex@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, Joshua Buhl, 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/coldwell/bugs/emacs/176171/.
[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.