Appendix A Copying, Changes, Development, FAQ, Texinfo Mode

A.1 Copying this Manual

The full license text can be read here:

A.1.1 GNU Free Documentation License

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software
Foundation, Inc.  https://fsf.org/

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

0. PREAMBLE

   The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document free in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

   This License is a kind of “copyleft”, which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.

   We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.

1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS

   This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License. Such a notice grants a world-wide, royalty-free license, unlimited in duration, to use that work under the conditions stated herein. The “Document”, below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as “you”. You accept the license if you copy, modify or distribute the work in a way requiring permission under copyright law.

   A “Modified Version” of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.

   A “Secondary Section” is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document’s overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.

   The “Invariant Sections” are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none.

   The “Cover Texts” are certain short passages of text that are listed, as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. A Front-Cover Text may be at most 5 words, and a Back-Cover Text may be at most 25 words.

   A “Transparent” copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format whose markup, or absence of markup, has been arranged to thwart or discourage subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. An image format is not Transparent if used for any substantial amount of text. A copy that is not “Transparent” is called “Opaque”.

   Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple HTML, PostScript or PDF designed for human modification. Examples of transparent image formats include PNG, XCF and JPG. Opaque formats include proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML, PostScript or PDF produced by some word processors for output purposes only.

   The “Title Page” means, for a printed book, the title page itself, plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, “Title Page” means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work’s title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text.

   The “publisher” means any person or entity that distributes copies of the Document to the public.

   A section “Entitled XYZ” means a named subunit of the Document whose title either is precisely XYZ or contains XYZ in parentheses following text that translates XYZ in another language. (Here XYZ stands for a specific section name mentioned below, such as “Acknowledgements”, “Dedications”, “Endorsements”, or “History”.) To “Preserve the Title” of such a section when you modify the Document means that it remains a section “Entitled XYZ” according to this definition.

   The Document may include Warranty Disclaimers next to the notice which states that this License applies to the Document. These Warranty Disclaimers are considered to be included by reference in this License, but only as regards disclaiming warranties: any other implication that these Warranty Disclaimers may have is void and has no effect on the meaning of this License.

2. VERBATIM COPYING

   You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.

   You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.

3. COPYING IN QUANTITY

   If you publish printed copies (or copies in media that commonly have printed covers) of the Document, numbering more than 100, and the Document’s license notice requires Cover Texts, you must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and legibly identify you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover must present the full title with all words of the title equally prominent and visible. You may add other material on the covers in addition. Copying with changes limited to the covers, as long as they preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim copying in other respects.

   If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent pages.

   If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy a computer-network location from which the general network-using public has access to download using public-standard network protocols a complete Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material. If you use the latter option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to the public.

   It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the Document.

4. MODIFICATIONS

   You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:

   1. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions (which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section of the Document). You may use the same title as a previous version if the original publisher of that version gives permission.
   2. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement.
   3. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified Version, as the publisher.
   4. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
   5. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent to the other copyright notices.
   6. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
   7. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document’s license notice.
   8. Include an unaltered copy of this License.
   9. Preserve the section Entitled “History”, Preserve its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no section Entitled “History” in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence.
   10. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the “History” section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
   11. For any section Entitled “Acknowledgements” or “Dedications”, Preserve the Title of the section, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.
   12. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.
   13. Delete any section Entitled “Endorsements”. Such a section may not be included in the Modified Version.
   14. Do not retitle any existing section to be Entitled “Endorsements” or to conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
   15. Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers.

   If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all of these sections as invariant. To do this, add their titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version’s license notice. These titles must be distinct from any other section titles.

   You may add a section Entitled “Endorsements”, provided it contains nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various parties—for example, statements of peer review or that the text has been approved by an organization as the authoritative definition of a standard.

   You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage of Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or through arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document already includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or by arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on behalf of, you may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.

   The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License give permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or imply endorsement of any Modified Version.

5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS

   You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice, and that you preserve all their Warranty Disclaimers.

   The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but different contents, make the title of each such section unique by adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original author or publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number. Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.

   In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled “History” in the various original documents, forming one section Entitled “History”; likewise combine any sections Entitled “Acknowledgements”, and any sections Entitled “Dedications”. You must delete all sections Entitled “Endorsements.”

6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS

   You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents released under this License, and replace the individual copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all other respects.

   You may extract a single document from such a collection, and distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert a copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that document.

7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS

   A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation’s users beyond what the individual works permit. When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the Document.

   If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one half of the entire aggregate, the Document’s Cover Texts may be placed on covers that bracket the Document within the aggregate, or the electronic equivalent of covers if the Document is in electronic form. Otherwise they must appear on printed covers that bracket the whole aggregate.

8. TRANSLATION

   Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section 4. Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special permission from their copyright holders, but you may include translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include a translation of this License, and all the license notices in the Document, and any Warranty Disclaimers, provided that you also include the original English version of this License and the original versions of those notices and disclaimers. In case of a disagreement between the translation and the original version of this License or a notice or disclaimer, the original version will prevail.

   If a section in the Document is Entitled “Acknowledgements”, “Dedications”, or “History”, the requirement (section 4) to Preserve its Title (section 1) will typically require changing the actual title.

9. TERMINATION

   You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.

   However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.

   Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.

   Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, receipt of a copy of some or all of the same material does not give you any rights to use it.

10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

    The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

    Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of this License can be used, that proxy’s public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Document.

11. RELICENSING

    “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site” (or “MMC Site”) means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration” (or “MMC”) contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.

    “CC-BY-SA” means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.

    “Incorporate” means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.

    An MMC is “eligible for relicensing” if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.

    The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents

To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the License in the document and put the following copyright and license notices just after the title page:

  Copyright (C)  year  your name.
  Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
  under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3
  or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
  with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
  Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the section entitled ``GNU
  Free Documentation License''.

If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover Texts, replace the “with…Texts.” line with this:

    with the Invariant Sections being list their titles, with
    the Front-Cover Texts being list, and with the Back-Cover Texts
    being list.

If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the situation.

If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software.

A.2 Changes and New Features

News in 12.2

• AUCTeX reflects the changes in LaTeX2e 2019-10-01 release. ‘filecontents’ environment now takes an optional argument and can be used anywhere in a document. The macros ‘\Ref’ and ‘\labelformat’ are moved from varioref.sty to LaTeX kernel. amsmath has a new macro ‘\overunderset’.
• A new method is implemented in preview-latex to adjust the foreground colors of generated images to those of Emacs, when the LaTeX command produces PDF. The traditional method became invalid because of the change introduced in Ghostscript 9.27. Unfortunately, the new method doesn’t work due to a bug in Ghostscript 9.27 and is valid only for Ghostscript > 9.27. There is also a fallback method for gs 9.27 users which displays plain “black on white” images. For successful function of preview-latex, the users are encouraged to set up the new user option preview-pdf-color-adjust-method to choose appropriate option among the three: new, traditional and fallback method.
• AUCTeX has support for the Flymake package in Emacs 26 or newer. To enable, call M-x flymake-mode RET or add this to your .emacs file:

  (add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook #'flymake-mode)
  

• The way the option TeX-record-buffer is used was corrected. It was used in just the opposite way as the document says. Erase the customization if you have customized this option since it now acts in reverse to your expectation.
• A former customize option japanese-TeX-command-list is removed. Use japanese-TeX-engine-default, or if it’s really necessary, customize TeX-command-list directly if the task which the option used to carry is required.
• Support for standard LaTeX without e-TeX extension is now very limited. It doesn’t work if raw TeX code is put on the command line to invoke latex command. It also fails for region compilation (C-c C-r and so on) with documents of non-ascii file name. In addition, it no longer works with preview-latex. We consider this incompatibility is permissible because e-TeX extension is enabled for standard LaTeX by default long ago. LaTeX variants such as XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX are not affected.
• Key binds in Texinfo mode are improved. Typing $, ^, _ and \ now just self-inserts without pointless side effects in Texinfo mode.

  In addition, the option TeX-electric-escape is now effective in Texinfo mode. When it is enabled, typing @ will invoke TeX-electric-macro offering completion in similar style with other TeX modes of AUCTeX.

• Fontification support for ‘biblatex’ package is improved and updated to macros provided by package version 3.12. For qualified lists, at least 2 mandatory arguments are fontified.
• Support for column specifiers ‘w’ and ‘W’ provided by ‘array’ package is added to array.el. The correct counting of columns only works when the ‘align’ parameter is enclosed in braces, e.g., ‘w{l}{3cm}’. The short version ‘wl{3cm}’ is not supported.
• Entries for ‘PDF Tools’ are added in TeX-view-program-list-builtin for Windows and macOS. This viewer can be configured under these operating systems with an entry like this in an init file:

  (setq TeX-view-program-selection '((output-pdf "PDF Tools")))
  

• Several other bugs were fixed, many minor features were added.

News in 12.1

• AUCTeX now requires GNU Emacs 24 or higher. Support for XEmacs has been dropped.
• Besides the change in the supported version of Emacs, there has been no functional change in this release, which is equivalent to version 11.92.

News in 11.92

• preview-latex is compatible with Ghostscript 9.22 where the operator ‘.runandhide’ is removed. All occurrences of ‘.runandhide’ in preview-latex are replaced by alternative code making it work with Ghostscript 9.22 again.
• AUCTeX has a new customize option TeX-math-input-method-off-regexp. When you begin to input a math formula, the current input method is turned off if its name matches this regular expression.

  In fact this variable was introduced long before, but has not been documented in info files nor turned into a customize option with defcustom until this release.

• The window system focus is pulled back to Emacs when viewing with evince-compatible viewers if a new customize option TeX-view-evince-keep-focus is non-nil.
• The usual dose of bug fixes was administered.

News in 11.91

• Now AUCTeX has a logo. The LaTeX code to create it is available in the etc/ directory of the package.
• Add support for upmendex, an extension of makeindex capable of sorting indexes by unicode based ICU.
• Fix preview-latex to interact correctly with Japanese LaTeX. The parsing routine was made robust not to be confused by the 7-bit encoding of Japanese text and the necessary option to LaTeX command is kept even when preamble caching is enabled.
• The new “Glossaries” entry in TeX-command-list runs the command makeglossaries.
• Fontification of control symbols has been improved. Characters defined in font-latex-match-simple-exclude-list do not receive any fontification. In DocTeX mode, the character ‘_’ is removed from font-latex-match-simple-exclude-list in order to fontify macros like ‘\__module_foo:nnn’ correctly.
• Fontification of math environments has been improved. Optional and/or mandatory argument(s) to environments are not fontified.
• preview.sty loads luatex85.sty if possible and should be compatible with newer luaTeX versions.
• AUCTeX has a new customize option TeX-ispell-verb-delimiters. This string contains usual characters used as delimiters for in-line verbatim macros like ‘\verb’. Text between delimiters after an in-line verbatim macro will be skipped during spell checking.
• Fontification of in-line verbatim macros has been improved. font-latex.el recognizes an optional or a mandatory argument for macros like ‘\Verb’ from fancyvrb.sty, ‘\mint’ and ‘\mintinline’ from minted.sty and fontifies verbatim content correctly.
• AUCTeX can put and parse labels in optional argument of environments. Inserting labels is done by new function LaTeX-env-label-as-keyval. A new customize option LaTeX-listing-label is available as prefix to labels in code typesetting environments, e.g. ‘lstlisting’ environment provided by ‘listings’ package. LaTeX-listing-label defaults to lst:. Parsing of labels for later referencing relies on two requirements:
  1. Label should come as last key-value argument, and
  2. label must be enclosed in braces, e.g.

     \begin{lstlisting}[caption=Some Caption,label={lst:foo}]
     ...
     \end{lstlisting}
     

• The function LaTeX-label now takes a second optional argument NO-INSERT. When non-nil, LaTeX-label reads a label and returns it as a string. This argument is also passed to any function bound to LaTeX-label-function (see next item).
• Incompatible change: The signature for the function passed with the customize option LaTeX-label-function has changed. The function bound to this variable is now expected to take an optional second argument NO-INSERT. When this argument is non-nil, the function should read and only return a label as a string; insertion is done by another function.
• Directory local variables were ineffective for japanese-latex-mode and japanese-plain-tex-mode. This bug was fixed. (This was actually done in AUCTeX 11.90, but not advertised)
• The output of Japanese text from Japanese TeX engines is decoded correctly for most cases, according to the encoding of the TeX documents and the locale. The difference between MS Windows, macOS and unix-like OS is taken into account. (This was actually done in AUCTeX 11.90, but not advertised)
• Quite a few new LaTeX packages are supported.
• As usual, many bugs were fixed.

News in 11.90

• In addition to the completion performed by TeX-complete-symbol, AUCTeX now also supports the new Emacs standard completion-at-point facility (see the Emacs command completion-at-point). This also means that modern completion UIs like company-mode work out of the box in TeX and LaTeX buffers. See Completion, for details.
• Completion is now aware of being inside a math environment and then completes math macros.
• AUCTeX is able to display several levels of super- and subscripts, each one raised above and a bit smaller than its basis. For this feature, have a look at the customize options font-latex-fontify-script (especially the new values multi-level and invisible) and font-latex-fontify-script-max-level. Also, the script characters ‘^’ and ‘_’ are also fontified with a special face named font-latex-script-char-face. See Fontification of math, for details.
• Parsing of format specification in various tabular environments has been improved. The function LaTeX-insert-item (C-c LFD) inserts suitable number of ampersands for ‘*{num}{cols}’ constructs. Style files for LaTeX packages ‘tabularx’, ‘tabulary’, ‘longtable’, ‘dcolumn’ and ‘siunitx’ are adapted to take advantage of this improvement.
• AUCTeX has a new Ispell dictionary tex-ispell.el for macros and environments which will be skipped during spell checking. The activiation of this feature is controlled by a new customize option TeX-ispell-extend-skip-list, which is set to t and activated by default.
• AUCTeX has a new customize option TeX-raise-frame-function that is currently only used by Evince and Atril inverse search to raise the Emacs frame.
• When inserting a new float, AUCTeX will now prompt for a short-caption if the length of the caption provided is greater than a certain size. This size is controlled via a new user option LaTeX-short-caption-prompt-length.
• Parsing of the compilation log has been reworked. You should encounter fewer mistaken files while navigating through errors and warnings.
• Two new user options, TeX-ignore-warnings and TeX-suppress-ignored-warnings, allow ignoring certain warnings after compilation of the document. See Ignoring warnings, for details.
• A new option, TeX-PDF-from-DVI, controls if and how to produce a PDF file by converting a DVI file. This supersedes TeX-PDF-via-dvips-ps2pdf which is still recognized but marked as obsolete and may be removed in future releases.
• Support for a number of external viewers has been added:
  • Atril viewer. Forward and inverse search requires version 1.9.1 or later to work.
  • dviout viewer on Windows. Note that this setup works when TeX-source-correlate-method is set to use ‘source-specials’ for DVI, e.g.:

    (setq TeX-source-correlate-method
          '((dvi . source-specials)
            (pdf . synctex)))
    

    which is the default.

  • SumatraPDF viewer on Windows.
  • Zathura viewer. Forward and inverse search requires a recent version of the program to work (3.4 or later).
• A new function, TeX-documentation-texdoc, for reading documentation with ‘texdoc’ has been added. TeX-doc is still available but now C-c ? runs TeX-documentation-texdoc.
• AUCTeX has a new custom option LaTeX-reftex-cite-format-auto-activate which controls the automatic activation of citation formats provided by RefTeX when a style file is loaded and RefTeX is enabled. Currently, biblatex.el, harvard.el, jurabib.el and natbib.el use this feature. If you have customized reftex-cite-format and want to use your settings, you should set this variable to nil.
• AUCTeX now has limited support for the TikZ package. For the moment, this includes some basic support for prompting the user of arguments to the ‘\draw’ macro.
• The style graphicx.el went through a bigger overhaul. The optional argument of command ‘\includegraphics’ now supports key-val query; keys can independently be chosen anytime by pressing the , key. As a side effect, the variable LaTeX-includegraphics-options-alist is now no-op and is removed from tex-style.el. You can safely remove any customization of it from your init file. The mandatory argument of ‘\includegraphics’ knows about image file extensions supported by the used engine and offers them for inclusion.
• Support for other LaTeX packages was improved, and style files for several new packages were added.
• Many bugs were crushed along the way.

News in 11.89

• 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. See Starting a Command, for details.
• 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.
• Before running commands like TeX and LaTeX, now AUCTeX performs some checks. If TeX-check-TeX is non-nil, it will test whether a working TeX distribution is actually present in the system and available to Emacs. Instead, when 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 added.
• Numbers of bugs have been fixed, many minor features have been added.

News in 11.88

• TeX-PDF-mode is now enabled by default.
• Now TeX-previous-error works with TeX commands if the new option TeX-parse-all-errors is non-nil, which is the default. When this option is non-nil, an overview of errors and warnings reported by the TeX compiler can be opened with M-x TeX-error-overview RET. See Debugging, for details.
• Style file authors are encouraged to distinguish common from expert macros and environments, and mark the latter using TeX-declare-expert-macros and LaTeX-declare-expert-environments.

  Users can then restrict completion using TeX-complete-expert-commands.

• Management of LaTeX package options in the parser was improved. You might need to reparse your documents, especially if you loaded the ‘babel’ package with language options.
• Now you can insert ‘$...$’ or ‘\(...\)’ by typing a single $. To do this, customize the new option ‘TeX-electric-math’. TeX-math-close-double-dollar was removed. See Quotes, for details.
• C-c RET documentclass RET completes with all available LaTeX classes, if the TeX-arg-input-file-search variable is non-nil. Completion for class options of the standard LaTeX classes is provided as well.
• New user options LaTeX-default-author, LaTeX-fontspec-arg-font-search, LaTeX-fontspec-font-list-default, TeX-date-format, and TeX-insert-braces-alist. A new possible value (show-all-optional-args) for TeX-insert-macro-default-style was added. The default value of TeX-source-correlate-method has been changed.
• ‘biblatex’ support was greatly expanded. If parsing is enabled, AUCTeX looks at ‘backend’ option to decide whether to use Biber or BibTeX. The LaTeX-biblatex-use-Biber variable was changed to be file local only and is no more customizable.
• With some LaTeX classes, the default environment suggested by LaTeX-environment (C-c C-e) when the current environment is ‘document’ was changed. With ‘beamer’ class the default environment is ‘frame’, with ‘letter’ it is ‘letter’, with ‘slides’ it is ‘slide’.
• Brace pairing feature was enhanced in LaTeX documents. Support for ‘\bigl’, ‘\Bigl’, ‘\biggl’ and ‘\Biggl’, the same as the one for ‘\left’, was added to TeX-insert-macro. For example, C-c RET bigl RET ( RET inserts ‘\bigl(\bigr)’.

  You can insert brace pair ‘()’, ‘{}’ and ‘[]’ by typing a single left brace if the new user option LaTeX-electric-left-right-brace is enabled.

  Macros ‘\langle’, ‘\lfloor’ and ‘\lceil’, which produce the left part of the paired braces, are treated similarly as ‘(’, ‘{’ and ‘[’ during the course of TeX-insert-macro. See Quotes, for details.

• Support for dozens of LaTeX packages was added.
• Tabular-like environments (tabular, tabular*, tabularx, tabulary, array, align, ...) are indented in a nicer and more informative way when the column values of a table line are written across multiple lines in the tex file.
• The suitable number of ampersands are inserted when you insert array, tabular and tabular* environments with C-c C-e. Similar experience is obtained if you terminate rows in these environments with C-c LFD. It supplies line break macro ‘\\’ and inserts the suitable number of ampersands on the next line.

  Similar supports are provided for various amsmath environments.

  See Tabular-like, for details.

• Commands for narrowing to a group (TeX-narrow-to-group) and to LaTeX environments (LaTeX-narrow-to-environment) were added.
• Now arbitrary options can be passed to the TeX processor on a per file basis using the TeX-command-extra-options option. See Processor Options, for details.
• Now C-c C-e document RET, in an empty document, prompts for ‘\usepackage’ macros in addition to ‘\documentclass’.
• TeX-add-style-hook has now a third argument to tell AUCTeX for which dialect (LaTeX, Texinfo or BibTeX) the style hook is registers. Labelling style hook by dialect will avoid applying them not in the right context.
• There have been lots of bug fixes and feature additions.

News in 11.87

• 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.

News in 11.86

• Parsing of LaTeX output was improved. It is now less likely that AUCTeX opens a non-existent file upon calling TeX-next-error; a problem for example encountered when using MiKTeX 2.8. In addition quoted file names as emitted by MiKTeX are now supported.
• A new framework for the definition and selection of viewers was implemented. If you have customizations regarding viewers you will have to redo them in this new framework or reenable the old one. See Starting Viewers, for details.
• Comprehensive editing support for PSTricks was added.
• Support for various LaTeX packages was added, e.g. ‘tabularx’, ‘CJK’, and ‘hyperref’.
• An easy way to switch between TeX engines (PDFTeX, LuaTeX, XeTeX, Omega) was added.
• Support for SyncTeX was added. This involves the command line options for LaTeX and the viewer.
• Folding can now be customized to use macro arguments as replacement text.
• ‘preview.sty’ now works with XeTeX.
• A lot of smaller and larger bugs have been squashed.

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 Processing Facilities.
• 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 Processing Facilities.

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.

A.3 Future Development

The following sections describe future development of AUCTeX. Besides mid-term goals, bug reports and requests we cannot fix or honor right away are being gathered here. If you have some time for Emacs Lisp hacking, you are encouraged to try to provide a solution to one of the following problems. If you don’t know Lisp, you may help us to improve the documentation. It might be a good idea to discuss proposed changes on the mailing list of AUCTeX first.

A.3.1 Mid-term Goals

• Integration of preview-latex into AUCTeX

  As of AUCTeX 11.81 preview-latex is a part of AUCTeX in the sense that the installation routines were merged and preview-latex is being packaged with AUCTeX.

  Further integration will happen at the backend. This involves folding of error parsing and task management of both packages which will ease development efforts and avoid redundant work.

• Error help catalogs

  Currently, the help for errors is more or less hardwired into tex.el. For supporting error help in other languages, it would be sensible to instead arrange error messages in language-specific files, make a common info file from all such catalogs in a given language and look the error texts up in an appropriate index. The user would then specify a preference list of languages, and the errors would be looked up in the catalogs in sequence until they were identified.

• Combining ‘docTeX’ with RefTeX

  Macro cross references should also be usable for document navigation using RefTeX.

A.3.2 Wishlist

• Documentation lookup for macros

  A parser could gather information about which macros are defined in which LaTeX packages and store the information in a hashtable which can be used in a backend for TeX-doc in order to open the matching documentation for a given macro. The information could also be used to insert an appropriate ‘\usepackage’ statement if the user tries to insert a macro for which the respective package has not been requested yet.

• Improvements to error reporting

  Fringe indicators for errors in the main text would be nice.

• A math entry grid

  A separate frame with a table of math character graphics to click on in order to insert the respective sequence into the buffer (cf. the “grid” of x-symbol).

• Crossreferencing support

  It would be nice if you could index process your favorite collection of .dtx files (such as the LaTeX source), just call a command on arbitrary control sequence, and get either the DVI viewer opened right at the definition of that macro (using Source Specials), or the source code of the .dtx file.

• Better plain TeX support

  For starters, LaTeX-math-mode is not very LaTeX-specific in the first place, and similar holds for indentation and formatting.

• Page count when compiling should (optionally) go to modeline of the window where the compilation command was invoked, instead of the output window. Suggested by Karsten Tinnefeld <tinnefeld@irb.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>.
• Command to insert a macrodefinition in the preamble, without moving point from the current location. Suggested by "Jeffrey C. Ely" <ely@nwu.edu>.
• A database of all commands defined in all stylefiles. When a command or environment gets entered that is provided in one of the styles, insert the appropriate \usepackage in the preamble.
• A way to add and overwrite math mode entries in style files, and to decide where they should be. Suggested by Remo Badii <Remo.Badii@psi.ch>.
• Create template for (first) line of tabular environment.
• I think prompting for the master is the intended behaviour. It corresponds to a ‘shared’ value for TeX-master.

  There should probably be a ‘none’ value which wouldn’t query for the master, but instead disable all features that relies on TeX-master.

  This default value for TeX-master could then be controled with mapping based on the extension.

• Use index files (when available) to speed up C-c C-m include RET.
• Option not to calculate very slow completions like for C-c C-m include RET.
• Font menu should be created from TeX-font-list.
• Installation procedure written purely in emacs lisp.
• Included PostScript files should also be counted as part of the document.
• A nice hierarchical by-topic organization of all officially documented LaTeX macros, available from the menu bar.
• TeX-command-default should be set from the master file, if not set locally. Suggested by Peter Whaite ‘<peta@cim.mcgill.ca>’.
• Make AUCTeX work with ‘crypt++’. Suggested by Chris Moore ‘<Chris.Moore@src.bae.co.uk>’.
• Make AUCTeX work with ‘longlines’. This would also apply to preview-latex, though it might make sense to unify error processing before attempting this.
• The ‘Spell’ command should apply to all files in a document. Maybe it could try to restrict to files that have been modified since last spell check? Suggested by Ravinder Bhumbla ‘<rbhumbla@ucsd.edu>’.
• Make . check for abbreviations and sentences ending with capital letters.
• Use Emacs 19 minibuffer history to choose between previewers, and other stuff. Suggested by John Interrante ‘<interran@uluru.Stanford.EDU>’.
• Documentation of variables that can be set in a style hook.

  We need a list of what can safely be done in an ordinary style hook. You can not set a variable that AUCTeX depends on, unless AUCTeX knows that it has to run the style hooks first.

  Here is the start of such a list.

  LaTeX-add-environments

  TeX-add-symbols

  LaTeX-add-labels

  LaTeX-add-bibliographies

  LaTeX-largest-level

• Outline should be (better) supported in TeX mode.

  At least, support headers, trailers, as well as TeX-outline-extra.

• TeX-header-start and TeX-trailer-end.

  We might want these, just for fun (and outlines)

• Plain TeX and LaTeX specific header and trailer expressions.

  We should have a way to globally specify the default value of the header and trailer regexps.

• Get closer to original TeX-mode keybindings.

  A third initialization file (tex-mode.el) containing an emulator of the standard TeX-mode would help convince some people to change to AUCTeX.

• Use markers in TeX-error-list to remember buffer positions in order to be more robust with regard to line numbers and changed files.
• Finish the Texinfo mode. For one thing, many Texinfo mode commands do not accept braces around their arguments.
• Hook up the letter environment with bbdb.el.

A.3.3 Bugs

• The style hooks automatically generated by parsing files for example.dtx, example.sty, example.drv and example.bib all clash. Bad. Clash with hand-written style hooks should be removed by dialect discrimination — to be checked.
• C-c ` should always stay in the current window, also when it finds a new file.
• Do not overwrite emacs warnings about existing auto-save files when loading a new file.
• Maybe the regexp for matching a TeX symbol during parsing should be ‘"\\\\\\([a-zA-Z]+\\|.\\)"’ — ‘<thiemann@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>’ Peter Thiemann.
• AUCTeX should not parse verbatim environments.
• Make ‘`’ check for math context in LaTeX-math-mode. and simply self insert if not in a math context.
• Make TeX-insert-dollar more robust. Currently it can be fooled by ‘\mbox’’es and escaped double dollar for example.
• Correct indentation for tabular, tabbing, table, math, and array environments.

A.4 Frequently Asked Questions

1. Something is not working correctly. What should I do?

   Well, you might have guessed it, the first place to look is in the available documentation packaged with AUCTeX. This could be the release notes (in the RELEASE file) or the news section of the manual in case you are experiencing problems after an upgrade, the INSTALL file in case you are having problems with the installation, the section about bugs in the manual in case you encountered a bug or the relevant sections in the manual for other related problems.

   If this did not help, you can send a bug report to the AUCTeX bug reporting list by using the command M-x TeX-submit-bug-report RET. But before you do this, you can try to get more information about the problem at hand which might also help you locate the cause of the error yourself.

   First, you can try to generate a so-called backtrace which shows the functions involved in a program error. In order to do this, start Emacs with the command line ‘emacs --debug-init’ and/or put the line

   (setq debug-on-error t)
   

   as the first line into your init file. After Emacs has started, you can load a file which triggers the error and a new window should pop up showing the backtrace. If you get such a backtrace, please include it in the bug report.

   Second, you can try to figure out if something in your personal or site configuration triggers the error by starting Emacs without such customizations. You can do this by invoking Emacs with the command line ‘emacs -q -no-site-file -l auctex’. The ‘-l’ option ‘auctex.el’ which you normally do in your init file. After you have started Emacs like this, you can load the file triggering the error. If everything is working now, you know that you have to search either in the site configuration file or your personal init file for statements related to the problem.

2. What versions of Emacs are supported?

   AUCTeX was tested with GNU Emacs 24. Older versions may work but are unsupported.

3. What should I do when ./configure does not find programs like latex?

   This is problem often encountered on Windows. Make sure that the PATH environment variable includes the directories containing the relevant programs, as described in Installation under MS Windows in the AUCTeX manual.

4. Why doesn’t the completion, style file, or multi-file stuff work?

   It must be enabled first, insert this in your init file:

   (setq-default TeX-master nil)
   (setq TeX-parse-self t)
   (setq TeX-auto-save t)
   

   Read also the chapters about parsing and multifile documents in the manual.

5. Why doesn’t TeX-save-document work?

   TeX-check-path has to contain "./" somewhere.

6. Why is the information in foo.tex forgotten when I save foo.bib?

   For various reasons, AUCTeX ignores the extension when it stores information about a file, so you should use unique base names for your files. E.g. rename foo.bib to foob.bib.

7. Why doesn’t AUCTeX signal when processing a document is done?

   If the message in the minibuffer stays "Type ‘C-c C-l’ to display results of compilation.", you probably have a misconfiguration in your init file (.emacs, init.el or similar). To track this down either search in the ‘*Messages*’ buffer for an error message or put (setq debug-on-error t) as the first line into your init file, restart Emacs and open a LaTeX file. Emacs will complain loudly by opening a debugging buffer as soon as an error occurs. The information in the debugging buffer can help you find the cause of the error in your init file.

8. Why does TeX-next-error (C-c `) fail?

   If TeX-file-line-error is set to nil (not the default), these sort of failures might be related to the the fact that when writing the log file, TeX puts information related to a file, including error messages, between a pair of parentheses. In this scenario AUCTeX determines the file where the error happened by parsing the log file and counting the parentheses. This can fail when there are other, unbalanced parentheses present.

   Activating so-called file:line:error messages for the log file usually solves this issue, as these kind of messages are are easier to parse; however, they may lack some details. Activation can be done either in the configuration of your TeX system (consult its manual to see where this is) or by simply keeping the variable TeX-file-line-error to the default value of non-nil.

9. What does AUC stand for?

   AUCTeX came into being at Aalborg University in Denmark. Back then the Danish name of the university was Aalborg Universitetscenter; AUC for short.

A.5 Features specific to AUCTeX’s Texinfo major mode

AUCTeX includes a major mode for editting Texinfo files. This major mode is not the same mode as the native Texinfo mode (see (texinfo)Texinfo Mode) of Emacs, although they have the same name. However, AUCTeX still relies on a number of functions from the native Texinfo mode.

The following text describes which functionality is offered by AUCTeX and which by the native Texinfo mode. This should enable you to decide when to consult the AUCTeX manual and when the manual of the native mode. And in case you are a seasoned user of the native mode, the information should help you to swiftly get to know the AUCTeX-specific commands.

A.5.1 How AUCTeX and the native mode work together

In a nutshell the split between AUCTeX Texinfo mode, and native Texinfo mode is as follows:

• Most of the editing (environment creation, commenting, font command insertions) and/or processing commands (e.g. compiling or printing) which are available in other AUCTeX modes are also handled by AUCTeX in Texinfo mode.
• Texinfo-related features (e.g. info node linkage or menu creation) rely on the commands provided by the native Texinfo mode. AUCTeX provides the key bindings to reach these functions, keeping the same keys as in native Texinfo whenever possible, or similar ones otherwise.

A.5.2 Where the native mode is superseded

This section is directed to users of the native Texinfo mode switching to AUCTeX. It follows the summary of the native mode (see (texinfo)Texinfo Mode Summary) and lists which of its commands are no longer of use.

Insert commands

In the native Texinfo mode, frequently used Texinfo commands can be inserted with key bindings of the form C-c C-c k where k differs for each Texinfo command; c inserts @code, d inserts @dfn, k @kbd, etc.

In AUCTeX commands are inserted with the key binding C-c C-m instead which prompts for the macro to be inserted. For font selection commands (like @b, @i, or @emph) and a few related ones (like @var, @key or @code) there are bindings which insert the respective macros directly. They have the form C-c C-f k or C-c C-f C-k and call the function TeX-font. Type C-c C-f RET to get a list of supported commands.

Note that the prefix argument is not handled the same way by AUCTeX. Note also that the node insertion command from the native mode (texinfo-insert-@node) can still accessed from the Texinfo menu in AUCTeX.

Insert braces

In AUCTeX braces can be inserted with the same key binding as in the native Texinfo mode: C-c {. But AUCTeX uses its own function for the feature: TeX-insert-braces.

Insert environments

The native Texinfo mode does not insert full environments. Instead, it provides the function texinfo-insert-@end (mapped to C-c C-c e) for closing an open environment with a matching @end statement.

In AUCTeX you can insert full environments, i.e. both the opening and closing statements, with the function Texinfo-environment (mapped to C-c C-e).

Format info files with makeinfo and TeX

In the native Texinfo mode there are various functions and bindings to format a region or the whole buffer for info or to typeset the respective text. For example, there is makeinfo-buffer (mapped to C-c C-m C-b) which runs ‘makeinfo’ on the buffer or there is texinfo-tex-buffer (mapped to C-c C-t C-b) which runs TeX on the buffer in order to produce a DVI file.

In AUCTeX different commands for formatting or typesetting can be invoked through the function TeX-command-master (mapped to C-c C-c). After typing C-c C-c, you can select the desired command, e.g ‘Makeinfo’ or ‘TeX’, through a prompt in the mini buffer. Note that you can make, say ‘Makeinfo’, the default by adding this statement in your init file:

(add-hook 'Texinfo-mode-hook 
          (lambda () (setq TeX-command-default "Makeinfo")))

Note also that C-c C-c Makeinfo RET is not completely functionally equivalent to makeinfo-buffer as the latter will display the resulting info file in Emacs, showing the node corresponding to the position in the source file, just after a successful compilation. This is why, while using AUCTeX, invoking makeinfo-buffer might still be more convenient.

Note also that in the case of a multifile document, C-c C-c in AUCTeX will work on the whole document (provided that the file variable TeX-master is set correctly), while makeinfo-buffer in the native mode will process only the current buffer, provided at the @setfilename statement is provided.

Produce indexes and print

The native Texinfo mode provides the binding C-c C-t C-i (texinfo-texindex) for producing an index and the bindings C-c C-t C-p (texinfo-tex-print) and C-c C-t C-q (tex-show-print-queue) for printing and showing the printer queue. These are superseded by the respective commands available through C-c C-c (TeX-command-master) in AUCTeX: Index, Print, and Queue.

Kill jobs

The command C-c C-t C-k (tex-kill-job) in the native mode is superseded by C-c C-k (TeX-kill-job) in AUCTeX.

A.5.3 Where key bindings are mapped to the native mode

This node follows the native Texinfo mode summary (see (texinfo)Texinfo Mode Summary) and lists only those commands to which AUCTeX provides a keybinding.

Basically all commands of the native mode related to producing menus and interlinking nodes are mapped to same or similar keys in AUCTeX, while a few insertion commands are mapped to AUCTeX-like keys.

@item insertion

The binding C-c C-c i for the insertion of @item in the native mode is mapped to M-RET or C-c C-j in AUCTeX, similar to other AUCTeX modes.

@end insertion

The binding C-c C-c e for closing a @foo command by a corresponding @end foo statement in the native mode is mapped to C-c C-] in AUCTeX, similar to other AUCTeX modes.

Move out of balanced braces

The binding C-} (up-list) is available both in the native mode and in AUCTeX. (This is because the command is not implemented in either mode but a native Emacs command.) However, in AUCTeX, you cannot use C-] for this, as it is used for @end insertion.

Update pointers

The bindings C-c C-u C-n (texinfo-update-node) and C-c C-u C-e (texinfo-every-node-update) from the native mode are available in AUCTeX as well.

Update menus

The bindings C-c C-u m (texinfo-master-menu), C-c C-u C-m (texinfo-make-menu), and C-c C-u C-a (texinfo-all-menus-update) from the native mode are available in AUCTeX as well. The command texinfo-start-menu-description, bound to C-c C-c C-d in the native mode, is bound to C-c C-u C-d in AUCTeX instead.

A.5.4 Which native mode key bindings are missing

The following commands from the native commands might still be useful when working with AUCTeX, however, they are not accessible with a key binding any longer.

@node insertion

The node insertion command, mapped to C-c C-c n in the native mode, is not mapped to any key in AUCTeX. You can still access it through the Texinfo menu, though. Another alternative is to use the C-c C-m binding for macro insertion in AUCTeX.

Show the section structure

The command texinfo-show-structure (C-c C-s) from the native mode does not have a key binding in AUCTeX. The binding is used by AUCTeX for sectioning.