[AUCTeX] AUCTeX 11.91 released

[Mosè Giordano]

Release notes for AUCTeX 11.91 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]

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
-------------------------------------------

Now AUCTeX has a logo.  The LaTeX code to create it is available in
the 'etc/' directory of the package.

Add support for 'upmendex', an extension of 'makeindex' capable of
sorting indexes by unicode based ICU.

Fix preview-latex to interact correctly with Japanese LaTeX.  The
parsing routine was made robust not to be confused by the 7-bit
encoding of Japanese text and the necessary option to LaTeX command
is kept even when preamble caching is enabled.

The new "Glossaries" entry in 'TeX-command-list' runs the command
'makeglossaries'.

Fontification of control symbols has been improved.  Characters
defined in 'font-latex-match-simple-exclude-list' do not receive
any fontification.  In DocTeX mode, the character '_' is removed
from 'font-latex-match-simple-exclude-list' in order to fontify
macros like '\__module_foo:nnn' correctly.

Fontification of math environments has been improved.  Optional
and/or mandatory argument(s) to environments are not fontified.

'preview.sty' loads 'luatex85.sty' if possible and should be
compatible with newer luaTeX versions.

AUCTeX has a new customize option 'TeX-ispell-verb-delimiters'.
This string contains usual characters used as delimiters for
in-line verbatim macros like '\verb'.  Text between delimiters
after an in-line verbatim macro will be skipped during spell
checking.

Fontification of in-line verbatim macros has been improved.
'font-latex.el' recognizes an optional or a mandatory argument for
macros like '\Verb' from 'fancyvrb.sty', '\mint' and '\mintinline'
from 'minted.sty' and fontifies verbatim content correctly.

AUCTeX can put and parse labels in optional argument of
environments.  Inserting labels is done by new function
'LaTeX-env-label-as-keyval'.  A new customize option
'LaTeX-listing-label' is available as prefix to labels in code
typesetting environments, e.g.  'lstlisting' environment provided
by 'listings' package.  'LaTeX-listing-label' defaults to 'lst:'.
Parsing of labels for later referencing relies on two requirements:
  1. Label should come as last key-value argument, and
  2. label must be enclosed in braces, e.g.
          \begin{lstlisting}[caption=Some Caption,label={lst:foo}]
          ...
          \end{lstlisting}

The function 'LaTeX-label' now takes a second optional argument
'NO-INSERT'.  When non-'nil', 'LaTeX-label' reads a label and
returns it as a string.  This argument is also passed to any
function bound to 'LaTeX-label-function' (see next item).

*Incompatible change:* The signature for the function passed with
the customize option 'LaTeX-label-function' has changed.  The
function bound to this variable is now expected to take an optional
second argument 'NO-INSERT'.  When this argument is non-'nil', the
function should read and only return a label as a string; insertion
is done by another function.

Directory local variables were ineffective for
'japanese-latex-mode' and 'japanese-plain-tex-mode'.  This bug was
fixed.  (This was actually done in AUCTeX 11.90, but not
advertised)

The output of Japanese text from Japanese TeX engines is decoded
correctly for most cases, according to the encoding of the TeX
documents and the locale.  The difference between MS Windows, macOS
and unix-like OS is taken into account.  (This was actually done in
AUCTeX 11.90, but not advertised)

Quite a few new LaTeX packages are supported.

As usual, many bugs were fixed.

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.

The preview-latex subsystem requires image support.  This is available
with GNU Emacs 21.3 under the X window system.  For Windows[2], Mac OS
X (Carbon, Cocoa)[3] or native GTK+ toolkit support, at least version
22.1 of GNU Emacs is required.  Emacs 22 and later is the recommended
platform for AUCTeX in general.  If you prefer XEmacs, it will work in
version 21.4.10 or later.

You'll also need a working LaTeX installation and Ghostscript.
dvipng[4] (version 1.4 or later), a very fast DVI converter, can be
used to speed up the conversion.

Availability
------------

The easiest way for getting AUCTeX, for users running Emacs 24.1 or
higher, is installing it with GNU ELPA, see
<URL:https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/auctex.html> for more information.
Other download options are available at
<URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/auctex/>.  At release time, we provide the
source tarball, 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).  You can also
use versions of Emacs that already include AUCTeX or a software
package management system for your operating system which provides you
with the latest release.

The XEmacs package file can be discerned by `pkg' in its name.  It is
usually more recent 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 3.

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 AUCTeX managers are Arash Esbati, Mosè Giordano, and Tassilo
Horn.  Everybody is welcome to contribute to the project by reporting
bugs and suggesting improvements, but the most effective way of
helping AUCTeX development remains volunteering for tasks.

The following people contributed to this release series (in
alphabetical order): Ivan Andrus, Ralf Angeli, Masayuki Ataka, Fabrice
Ben Hamouda, Thomas Baumann, Vincent Belaïche, Berend de Boer, Uwe
Brauer, Ken Brown, Joshua Buhl, Patrice Dumas, Arash Esbati, Werner
Fink, Miguel Frasson, Peter S. Galbraith, Mosè Giordano, Patrick
Gundlach, Jobst Hoffmann, Tassilo Horn, Yvon Hevel, Orlando Iovino,
Mads Jensen, Arne Jørgensen, David Kastrup, Ikumi Keita, Philip Kime,
Oleh Krehel, Joost Kremers, Frank Küster, Jan-Åke Larsson, Matthew
Leach, Antoine Levitt, Leo Liu, Vladimir Lomov, Stefan Monnier, Dan
Nicolaescu, Piet van Oostrum, Nicolas Richard, Augusto Ritter Stoffel,
Florent Rougon, Santiago Saavedra, Davide G. M. Salvetti, Rüdiger
Sonderfeld, Holger Sparr, 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 Emacs for Windows at
<URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/>.

[3]  See e.g. <URL:http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsForMacOS>
for a list of precompiled versions of Emacs for Mac OS X.

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

--
Mosè Giordano, on behalf of the AUCTeX team