Release of AUCTeX-11.50

[David Kastrup]

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:address@hidden>.
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
Küster, Jan-Åke 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, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum