AUCTeX 11.52 released

[David Kastrup]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.emacs,comp.emacs.xemacs,comp.text.tex as well.


After a lot of gnashing of teeth and prodding around in things and
fishing out the last bugs, this should finally be the release that
installs and works cleanly on all supported platforms.  I apologize
for the unintended frequency of announcements.

The auctex-emacs-11.52-1.fedora.*.rpm files have a dependency issue
and will not install when preview-latex is installed (unless you use
the --nodeps option).  Use auctex-11.52-2.fedora.src.rpm and/or
auctex-emacs-11.52-2.fedora.noarch.rpm instead.


Release notes for AUCTeX 11.52
==============================

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, 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 during entry.

Interfaces in this release remain a moving target with the
documentation lagging somewhat.  We need volunteers in particular for
non-programming tasks: documentation writing, tutorials, translations,
reference material, sleuth work, testing.


New features and fixed bugs in this release
-------------------------------------------

Third time's the charm.  This is another big bad bug fix release to
the major release 11.50 from Friday 13th.  Installation and menus
under XEmacs work again (maybe for the first time).  Fontification of
subscripts and superscripts is now disabled when the fontification
engine is not able to support it properly.  As a consequence,
currently this feature is only available for developer versions of
Emacs.  The `install' targets now use `DESTDIR' which should make
compilation for SuSE and Debian feasible.

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.  Many such changes can be avoided by using other
customization variables.


Requirements
------------

It is required 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.  For XEmacs, 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: please use the XEmacs package system for
upgrading if necessary.  The current developers don't have the
resources for providing backward compatibility to earlier versions.


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

AUCTeX can be downloaded from <URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex>.
There are tarballs, and RPMs for Fedora (for Emacs).  A separate
directory contains some stuff from the tarball, such as ChangeLog,
printable manuals, 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
address.


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.

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 series (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 accept our apologies if we forgot
somebody).

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum