Release notes for AUCTeX 11.87 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 ------------------------------------------- AUCTeX now supports Biber in conjunction with biblatex in addition to BibTeX. Each AUCTeX mode now has its own abbrev table. On Emacsen which provide the possibility to inherit abbrevs from other tables, the abbrevs from the Text mode abbrev table are available as well. Newly defined abbrevs are written to the mode-specific tables, though. The file tex-fptex.el was removed. Forward/backward search for Evince has been improved. If Emacs is compiled with DBUS support and a recent Evince version (3.x) is installed, the communication goes over the desktop bus instead of the command line, resulting in more accurate positioning of point in Emacs and highlighting of the target paragraph in Evince. A problem where Ghostscript threw an /invalidfileaccess error when running preview-latex was fixed. A lot of smaller fixes and additions have been made. 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 . 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 , 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 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): Ralf Angeli, Masayuki Ataka, Thomas Baumann, Vincent Belaïche, Berend de Boer, Ken Brown, Joshua Buhl, Patrice Dumas, Miguel Frasson, Peter S. Galbraith, Patrick Gundlach, Tassilo Horn, Yvon Hevel, Mads Jensen, Arne Jørgensen, David Kastrup, Ikumi Keita, Philip Kime, Joost Kremers, Frank Küster, Jan-Åke Larsson, Antoine Levitt, Dan Nicolaescu, Piet van Oostrum, Augusto Ritter Stoffel, Davide G. M. Salvetti, Holger Sparr, Mike Sperber, Reiner Steib, Christian Schlauer, Shiro Takeda, Mark Trettin (Please accept our apologies if we forgot somebody.) Footnotes: [1] [2] You can get a precompiled version of Emacs for Windows at . [3] See e.g. for a list of precompiled versions of Emacs for Mac OS X. [4] dvipng is available via its project page and from CTAN.