B. Changes and New Features

News in 11.85

• Font locking has been improved significantly. It is now less prone to color bleeding which could lead to high resource usage. In addition it now includes information about LaTeX macro syntax and can indicate syntactically incorrect macros in LaTeX mode.
• The license was updated to GPLv3.
• Support for the nomencl, flashcards and comment LaTeX packages as well as the Icelandic language option of babel were added.
• Support for folding of math macros was added.
• Lots of minor bugs in features and documentation fixed.

News in 11.84

• There have been problems with the ‘-without-texmf-dir’ option to ‘configure’ when the value of ‘-with-kpathsea-sep’ was set or determined for an installation system with a default different from that of the runtime system. with-kpathsea-sep has been removed; the setting is now usually determined at runtime.

  Due to this and other problems, preview-latex in the released XEmacs package failed under Windows or with anything except recent 21.5 XEmacsen.

• AUCTeX and preview-latex have been changed in order to accommodate file names containing spaces. preview-latex now tolerates bad PostScript code polluting the stack (like some Omega fonts).
• ‘preview.sty’ had in some cases failed to emit PostScript header specials.
• Support for folding of comments was added.
• The polish language option of the babel LaTeX package as well as the polski LaTeX package are now supported. Most notably this means that AUCTeX will help to insert quotation marks as defined by polish.sty ("`..."') and polski.sty (,,...'').
• The TeX tool bar is now available and enabled by default in plain TeX mode. See Running TeX and friends.
• Bug fix in the display of math subscripts and superscripts.
• Bug fix TeX-doc for Emacs 21.
• There has been quite a number of other bug fixes to various features and documentation across the board.

News in 11.83

• The new function TeX-doc provides easy access to documentation about commands and packages or information related to TeX and friends in general. See Documentation.
• You can now get rid of generated intermediate and output files by means of the new ‘Clean’ and ‘Clean All’ entries in TeX-command-list accessible with C-c C-c or the Command menu. See Cleaning.
• Support for forward search with PDF files was added. That means you can jump to a place in the output file corresponding to the position in the source file. See Viewing.

  Adding support for this feature required the default value of the variable TeX-output-view-style to be changed. Please make sure you either remove any customizations overriding the new default or incorporate the changes into your customizations if you want to use this feature.

• TeX error messages of the -file-line-error kind are now understood in AUCTeX and preview-latex (parsers are still separate).
• Bug fix in XyMTeX support.
• The LaTeX tool bar is now enabled by default. See Running TeX and friends.

News in 11.82

• Support for the MinionPro LaTeX package was added.
• Warnings and underfull/overfull boxes are now being indicated in the echo area after a LaTeX run, if the respective debugging options are activated with TeX-toggle-debug-warnings (C-c C-t C-w) or TeX-toggle-debug-bad-boxes (C-c C-t C-b). In this case TeX-next-error will find these warnings in addition to normal errors.

  The key binding C-c C-w for TeX-toggle-debug-bad-boxes (which was renamed from TeX-toggle-debug-boxes) now is deprecated.

• AUCTeX now can automatically insert a pair of braces after typing <_> or <^> in math constructs if the new variable TeX-electric-sub-and-superscript is set to a non-nil value.
• Some language-specific support for French was added. There now is completion support for the commands provided by the ‘frenchb’ (and ‘francais’) options of the babel LaTeX package and easier input of French quotation marks (\\og ...\\fg) which can now be inserted by typing <">.
• Completion support for options of some LaTeX packages was added.
• Already in version 11.81 the way to activate AUCTeX changed substantially. This should now be done with (load "auctex.el" nil t t) instead of the former (require 'tex-site). Related to this change ‘tex-mik.el’ does not load ‘tex-site.el’ anymore. That means if you used only (require 'tex-mik) in order to activate AUCTeX, you have to add (load "auctex.el" nil t t) before the latter statement. See Loading the package.
• Handling of verbatim constructs was consolidated across AUCTeX. This resulted in the font-latex-specific variables font-latex-verb-like-commands, font-latex-verbatim-macros, and font-latex-verbatim-environments being removed and the more general variables LaTeX-verbatim-macros-with-delims, LaTeX-verbatim-macros-with-braces, and LaTeX-verbatim-environments being added.
• The output of a BibTeX run is now checked for warnings and errors, which are reported in the echo area.
• The aliases for font-latex-title-fontify were removed. Use font-latex-fontify-sectioning instead.
• The problem that Japanese macros where broken across lines was fixed.
• Various bug fixes.

News in 11.81

• LaTeX-mark-section now marks subsections of a given section as well. The former behavior is available via the prefix argument.
• preview-latex which was previously available separately became a subsystem of AUCTeX. There is no documented provision for building or installing preview-latex separately. It is still possible to use and install AUCTeX without preview-latex, however.
• The installation procedures have been overhauled and now also install startup files as part of the process (those had to be copied manually previously). You are advised to remove previous installations of AUCTeX and preview-latex before starting the installation procedure. A standard installation from an unmodified tarball no longer requires Makeinfo or Perl.

  Also note that the way AUCTeX is supposed to be activated changed. Instead of (require 'tex-site) you should now use (load "auctex.el" nil t t). While the former method may still work, the new method has the advantage that you can deactivate a preactivated AUCTeX with the statement (unload-feature 'tex-site) before any of its modes have been used. This may be important especially for site-wide installations.

• Support for the babel LaTeX package was added.
• Folding a buffer now ensures that the whole buffer is fontified before the actual folding is carried out. If this results in unbearably long execution times, you can fall back to the old behavior of relying on stealth font locking to do this job in the background by customizing the variable TeX-fold-force-fontify.
• Folded content now reveals part of its original text in a tooltip or the echo area when hovering with the mouse pointer over it.
• The language-specific insertion of quotation marks was generalized. The variables LaTeX-german-open-quote, LaTeX-german-close-quote, LaTeX-german-quote-after-quote, LaTeX-italian-open-quote, LaTeX-italian-close-quote, and LaTeX-italian-quote-after-quote are now obsolete. If you are not satisfied with the default settings, you should customize TeX-quote-language-alist instead.
• Similar to language-specific quote insertion, AUCTeX now helps you with hyphens in different languages as well. See European, for details.
• Fill problems in Japanese text introduced in AUCTeX 11.55 were fixed. AUCTeX tries not to break lines between 1-byte and 2-byte chars. These features will work in Chinese text, too.
• The scaling factor of the fontification of sectioning commands can now be customized using the variable font-latex-fontify-sectioning. This variable was previously called font-latex-title-fontify; In this release we provide an alias but this will disappear in one of the the next releases. The faces for the sectioning commands are now called font-latex-sectioning-N-face (N=0…5) instead of font-latex-title-N-face (N=1…4). Analogously the names of the variables holding the related keyword lists were changed from font-latex-title-N-keywords to font-latex-sectioning-N-keywords. See Font Locking, for details. Make sure to adjust your customizations.
• Titles in beamer slides marked by the “\frametitle” command are know displayed with the new face font-latex-slide-title-face. You can add macros to be highlighted with this face to font-latex-match-slide-title-keywords.
• Of course a lot of bugs have been fixed.

News in 11.55

• A bug was fixed which lead to the insertion of trailing whitespace during filling. In particular extra spaces were added to sentence endings at the end of lines. You can make this whitespace visible by setting the variable show-trailing-whitespace to t. If you want to delete all trailing whitespace in a buffer, type M-x delete-trailing-whitespace RET.
• A bug was fixed which lead to a ‘*Compile-Log*’ buffer popping up when the first LaTeX file was loaded in an Emacs session.
• On some systems the presence of an outdated Emacspeak package lead to the error message ‘File mode specification error: (error "Variable binding depth exceeds max-specpdl-size")’. Precautions were added which prevent this error from happening. But nevertheless, it is advised to upgrade or uninstall the outdated Emacspeak package.
• The value of TeX-macro-global is not determined during configuration anymore but at load time of AUCTeX. Consequently the associated configuration option ‘--with-tex-input-dirs’ was removed.
• Support for the LaTeX Japanese classes ‘jsarticle’ and ‘jsbook’ was added.

News in 11.54

• The parser (used e.g. for TeX-auto-generate-global) was extended to recognize keywords common in LaTeX packages and classes, like “\DeclareRobustCommand” or “\RequirePackage”. Additionally a bug was fixed which led to duplicate entries in AUCTeX style files.
• Folding can now be done for paragraphs and regions besides single constructs and the whole buffer. With the new TeX-fold-dwim command content can both be hidden and shown with a single key binding. In course of these changes new key bindings for unfolding commands where introduced. The old bindings are still present but will be phased out in future releases.
• Info files of the manual now have a .info extension.
• There is an experimental tool bar support now. It is not activated by default. If you want to use it, add

  (add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'LaTeX-install-toolbar)

  to your init file.

• The manual now contains a new chapter “Quick Start”. It explains the main features and how to use them, and should be enough for a new user to start using AUCTeX.
• A new section “Font Locking” was added to the manual which explains syntax highlighting in AUCTeX and its customization. Together with the sections related to folding and outlining, the section is part of the new chapter “Display”.
• Keywords for syntax highlighting of LaTeX constructs to be typeset in bold, italic or typewriter fonts may now be customized. Besides the built-in classes, new keyword classes may be added by customizing the variable ‘font-latex-user-keyword-classes’. The customization options can be found in the customization group ‘font-latex-keywords’.
• Verbatim content is now displayed with the ‘fixed-pitch’ face. (GNU Emacs only)
• Syntax highlighting should not spill out of verbatim content anymore. (GNU Emacs only)
• Verbatim commands like ‘\verb|...|’ will not be broken anymore during filling.
• You can customize the completion for graphic files with LaTeX-includegraphics-read-file.
• Support for the LaTeX packages ‘url’, ‘listings’, ‘jurabib’ and ‘csquotes’ was added with regard to command completion and syntax highlighting.
• Performance of fontification and filling was improved.
• Insertion of nodes in Texinfo mode now supports completion of existing node names.
• Setting the variable LaTeX-float to nil now means that you will not be prompted for the float position of figures and tables. You can get the old behaviour of nil by setting the variable to "", i.e. an empty string. See also Floats.
• The XEmacs-specific bug concerning overlays-at was fixed.
• Lots of bug fixes.

News in 11.53

• The LaTeX math menu can include Unicode characters if your Emacs built supports it. See the variable LaTeX-math-menu-unicode, Mathematics.
• Bug fixes for XEmacs.
• Completion for graphic files in the TeX search path has been added.
• start is used for the viewer for MiKTeX and fpTeX.
• The variable TeX-fold-preserve-comments can now be customized to deactivate folding in comments.

News in 11.52

• 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.
• Bug fixes in the build process.

News in 11.51

• PDFTeX and Source Special support did not work with ConTeXt, this has been fixed. Similar for Source Special support under Windows.
• Omega support has been added.
• Bug fixes in the build process.
• TeX-fold now supports folding of environments in Texinfo mode.

News in 11.50

• The use of source specials when processing or viewing the document can now be controlled with the new TeX-source-specials minor mode which can be toggled via an entry in the Command menu or the key binding C-c C-t C-s. If you have customized the variable TeX-command-list, you have to re-initialize it for this to work. This means to open a customization buffer for the variable by typing M-x customize-variable RET TeX-command-list RET, selecting “Erase Customization” and do your customization again with the new default.
• The content of the command menu now depends on the mode (plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt etc.). Any former customization of the variable TeX-command-list has to be erased. Otherwise the command menu and the customization will not work correctly.
• Support for hiding and auto-revealing macros, e.g. footnotes or citations, and environments in a buffer was added, Folding.
• You can now control if indentation is done upon typing <RET> by customizing the variable TeX-newline-function, Indenting.
• Limited support for doc.sty and ltxdoc.cls (‘dtx’ files) was added. The new docTeX mode provides functionality for editing documentation parts. This includes formatting (indenting and filling), adding and completion of macros and environments while staying in comments as well as syntax highlighting. (Please note that the mode is not finished yet. For example syntax highlighting does not work yet in XEmacs.)
• For macro completion in docTeX mode the AUCTeX style files ‘doc.el’, ‘ltxdoc.el’ and ‘ltx-base.el’ were included. The latter provides general support for low-level LaTeX macros and may be used with LaTeX class and style files as well. It is currently not loaded automatically for those files.
• Support for ConTeXt with a separate ConTeXt mode is now included. Macro definitions for completion are available in Dutch and English.
• The filling and indentation code was overhauled and is now able to format commented parts of the source syntactically correct. Newly available functionality and customization options are explained in the manual.
• Filling and indentation in XEmacs with preview-latex and activated previews lead to the insertion of whitespace before multi-line previews. AUCTeX now contains facilities to prevent this problem.
• If TeX-master is set to t, AUCTeX will now query for a master file only when a new file is opened. Existing files will be left alone. The new function TeX-master-file-ask (bound to C-c _ is provided for adding the variable manually.
• Sectioning commands are now shown in a larger font on display devices which support such fontification. The variable font-latex-title-fontify can be customized to restore the old appearance, i.e. the usage of a different color instead of a change in size.
• Support for alphanum.sty, beamer.cls, booktabs.sty, captcont.sty, emp.sty, paralist.sty, subfigure.sty and units.sty/nicefrac.sty was added. Credits go to the authors mentioned in the respective AUCTeX style files.
• Inserting graphics with C-c RET \includegraphics RET was improved. See the variable LaTeX-includegraphics-options-alist.
• If LaTeX-default-position is nil, don't prompt for position arguments in Tabular-like environments, see Tabular-like.
• Completion for available packages when using C-c RET \usepackage RET was improved on systems using the kpathsea library.
• The commenting functionality was fixed. The separate functions for commenting and uncommenting were unified in one function for paragraphs and regions respectively which do both.
• Syntax highlighting can be customized to fontify quotes delimited by either >>German<< or <<French>> quotation marks by changing the variable font-latex-quotes.
• Certain TeX/LaTeX keywords for functions, references, variables and warnings will now be fontified specially. You may add your own keywords by customizing the variables font-latex-match-function-keywords, font-latex-match-reference-keywords, font-latex-match-variable-keywords and font-latex-match-warning-keywords.
• If you include the style files ‘german’ or ‘ngerman’ in a document (directly or via the ‘babel’ package), you should now customize LaTeX-german-open-quote, LaTeX-german-close-quote and LaTeX-german-quote-after-quote instead of TeX-open-quote, TeX-close-quote and TeX-quote-after-quote if you want to influence the type of quote insertion.
• Upon viewing an output file, the right viewer and command line options for it are now determined automatically by looking at the extension of the output file and certain options used in the source file. The behavior can be adapted or extended respectively by customizing the variable TeX-output-view-style.
• You can control whether TeX-insert-macro (C-c RET) ask for all optional arguments by customizing the variable TeX-insert-macro-default-style, Completion.
• TeX-run-discard is now able to completely detach a process that it started.
• The build process was enhanced and is now based on autoconf making installing AUCTeX a mostly automatic process. See Installation and Installation under MS Windows for details.

News in 11.14

• Many more LaTeX and LaTeX2e commands are supported. Done by Masayuki Ataka <ataka@milk.freemail.ne.jp>

News in 11.12

• Support for the KOMA-Script classes. Contributed by Mark Trettin <Mark.Trettin@gmx.de>.

News in 11.11

• Support for ‘prosper.sty’, see http://prosper.sourceforge.net/. Contributed by Phillip Lord <p.lord@russet.org.uk>.

News in 11.10

• comment-region now inserts %% by default. Suggested by "Davide G. M. Salvetti" <salve@debian.org>.

News in 11.06

• You can now switch between using the ‘font-latex’ (all emacsen), the ‘tex-font’ (Emacs 21 only) or no special package for font locking. Customize TeX-install-font-lock for this.

News in 11.04

• Now use -t landscape by default when landscape option appears. Suggested by Erik Frisk <frisk@isy.liu.se>.

News in 11.03

• Use ‘tex-fptex.el’ for fpTeX support. Contributed by Fabrice Popineau <Fabrice.Popineau@supelec.fr>.

News in 11.02

• New user option LaTeX-top-caption-list specifies environments where the caption should go at top. Contributed by ataka@milk.freemail.ne.jp (Masayuki Ataka).
• Allow explicit dimensions in ‘graphicx.sty’. Contributed by ataka@milk.freemail.ne.jp (Masayuki Ataka).
• Limited support for ‘verbatim.sty’. Contributed by ataka@milk.freemail.ne.jp (Masayuki Ataka).
• Better support for asmmath items. Patch by ataka@milk.freemail.ne.jp (Masayuki Ataka).
• More accurate error parsing. Added by David Kastrup <David.Kastrup@t-online.de>.

News in 11.01

• Bug fixes.

Older versions

See the file ‘history.texi’ for older changes.

This document was generated by Ralf Angeli on February, 10 2008 using texi2html 1.78.