[Info-AUCTeX] AUCTeX 11.89 released

[Mosè Giordano]

Release notes for AUCTeX 11.89 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
-------------------------------------------

You can now run all commands needed to compile a document and then
open the viewer with a single command: 'TeX-command-run-all', bound
to 'C-c C-a'.

Commands such as LaTeX and View can now be executed conveniently on
the current section (or part, chapter, subsection, etc).  See
'LaTeX-command-section' and 'LaTeX-command-section-change-level'.

Forward and backward search with Evince now also work when only a
region of the document is compiled/viewed.

To open the PDF output file you can now use also PDF Tools, a
document viewer for Emacs.  With it, as a plus, forward and
backward search is accurate at word level.

With new option 'TeX-PDF-via-dvips-ps2pdf' it is possible to
compile a document to DVI and then convert it to PDF using
'dvips'-'ps2pdf' before viewing it.

New option 'TeX-file-line-error' allows to select file:line:error
style for error messages.

Indent '\[...\]' math mode as a regular environment by default.

Now AUCTeX suggests to run 'makeindex' when appropriate.

'TeX-view-program-list' can contain, as third optional element of
each item, the name of the executable(s) needed to open the viewer.

'TeX-expand-list' variable has been split into 'TeX-expand-list'
and 'TeX-expand-list-builtin'.  Only the former is intended to be
customized by the user, the latter contains built-in expanders.
You might want to keep in 'TeX-expand-list' only new expansion
strings.

When new option 'TeX-check-engine' is non-nil, before running LaTeX
commands AUCTeX will check whether the correct engine has been set,
based upon known restrictions posed by LaTeX packages.

Basic support to ConTeXt Mark IV has been added.  Users can now
select the Mark version to be used with new option
'ConTeXt-Mark-version', and AUCTeX is able to catch error messages
in the output log of a Mark IV document.

Support for tons of LaTeX packages has been addedd.

Numbers of bugs have been fixed, many minor features have been
addedd.

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

AUCTeX can be downloaded in various formats from
<URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/auctex/>.  At release time, we provide the
source tarball, a precompiled version for Emacs on Windows, 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).  The easiest way for using AUCTeX, of
course, is using 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 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): Ivan Andrus, Ralf Angeli, Masayuki Ataka, Fabrice
Ben Hamouda, Thomas Baumann, Vincent Belaïche, Berend de Boer, 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