Release notes for AUCTeX 12.3 with preview-latex ================================================
AUCTeX provides by far the most wide-spread and sophisticated environment for editing LaTeX, TeX, ConTeXt and Texinfo documents with Emacs. 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 ------------------------------------------- Support for 'PSTricks' is now PDF-oriented. AUCTeX no longer turns off PDF mode for 'PSTricks' documents even without 'pst-pdf'. It now sets up 'TeX-PDF-from-DVI' option so that PDF output is generated when 'TeX-PDF-mode' is enabled (default). Users who want DVI output should disable PDF mode explicitly by file local variable, or customize 'TeX-PDF-mode' to 'nil'. The function 'font-latex-update-font-lock' has been obsoleted in order to fix 'bug#37945'. That function was used by several style files in order to refresh fontification after adding new symbols or verbatim constructs. It is better to call 'font-lock-flush' in the former case and 'font-latex-set-syntactic-keywords' in the latter case. The function 'font-latex-update-font-lock' still exists as a no-op which only shows a warning explaining how to update font-lock as mentioned above. Math expression highlighting was improved. Highlighting for documents with a lot of inline math expressions '$...$' won't get scrambled now ('bug#33139'). There is small incompatibility due to this fix. When odd number of dollar signs are in a comment, the subsequent lines are highlighted as math until another '$' appears. You can insert a commented dollar sign ('%$') at the next suitable end of line as a workaround. In addition, it is no longer recommended to customize 'font-latex-math-environments'. Use 'texmathp-tex-commands' instead. AUCTeX tracks changes in LaTeX2e 2020-02-02 release. AUCTeX supports the improvements to LaTeX font selection mechanism (NFSS). New macros like '\textsw' or '\textulc' are added to font insertion keyboard commands. See the section for inserting font specifiers for details. Further, the entries in the menu LaTeX, Insert Font are reorganized and adjusted accordingly. Macros previously provided by 'textcomp.sty' are now part of LaTeX kernel. AUCTeX tracks this change as well and support for the new macro '\legacyoldstylenums' is added. Insertion of environments in LaTeX documents (i.e. 'C-c C-e') was improved. The former code had a few bugs, which sometimes resulted in either spurious empty line or spurious comment prefix, or both, especially when the region is active. Those bugs are now fixed. More bugs fixed, other minor features implemented. Requirements ------------ It is required that you use at least GNU Emacs 24. The preview-latex subsystem requires image support. You'll also need a working LaTeX installation and Ghostscript. dvipng[2] (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 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:https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/auctex/>. At release time, we provide the source tarball. 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. 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:https://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, Mohammad Hossein Bateni, Fabrice Ben Hamouda, Thomas Baumann, Vincent Belaïche, Berend de Boer, Alex Branham, Uwe Brauer, Ken Brown, Joshua Buhl, Jean-François Burnol, 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, Pieter Pareit, 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:https://www.ctan.org/pkg/preview> [2] dvipng is available via its project page <URL:https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/dvipng> and from CTAN. -- Mosè Giordano, on behalf of the AUCTeX team -- If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.