[AUCTeX-devel] more x-symbol features?

[Uwe Brauer]

>> "Tassilo" == Tassilo Horn <address@hidden> writes:


Hi,


   Tassilo> Glad we have that now. Then I'll do the region/section stuff
   Tassilo> ASAP, Mosè does the Index suggestion, and then we can have a
   Tassilo> new shiny release (after a bit of testing)! I think we have
   Tassilo> accumulated more than enough additions, fixes, and new
   Tassilo> features to think about that.


First of all thanks for implementing one of the most important features
of x-symbol-mode in native auctex, since now a switch to GNU emacs is
much easier for me.

I would like however to suggest two more features which I find
interesting. Maybe they should be included in the wishlist or maybe the
second one can be easily implemented?

X-symbol-mode has three essential features. For me the most important ones are:

    -  display of constructs \integral by symbols, together with sub and
       super indices . This feature is now implemented for GNU emacs
       using  the pretty-symbol-mode.
       Xemacs is left out, but this is xemacs fault and anyhow  in
       Xemacs x-symbol-mode works, still.[1]

    -  display of \includegraphics{fig.png} including pdf jpg (I think).
       I know I could use latex-preview for that. But on a large file I
       find it less convenient  to use preview-latex. GNU emacs displays
       as far as know, png, jpg and pdf internally. So the question is
       whether a (minor-mode) could be cooked up to deal with such latex
       constructs.
       Maybe this is already be implemented and I am just ignorant of
       this GNU Emacs feature.

    -  cleaning of ASCII 7bits constructs by 8bit[2] chars. Take for
       example the «letter» à. As far as I know this can be generated in
       TeX by \`a or {\`a} or \`{a} etc etc. Although in 2015 almost
       every editor I know should display 8bit chars, I still receive
       documents constaining such constructs of my colleagues. Now
       x-symbol-mode does two things:

        -  it converts all these constructs to (internally) à[3]

        -  and then save them either 8bit/UTF8 or
        -  as 7bit \`a 


I know there are a lot of packages around doing all sort similar
conversions. I have written one by myself. But may be such a feature
could be included in auctex in order to unify that approach.



Uwe Brauer 

Footnotes:
[1]  however even the Xemacs community is not willing to make
     x-symbol-mode run in future releases of xemacs, since x-symbol-mode
     is orphaned since 2003 and almost nobody of the Xemacs teams uses LaTeX

[2]  I say 8bit, since I want to avoid talking about Mule or other
     multibyte stuff.

[3]  I say internally since in my understanding there is a fundamental
     difference between Xemacs and GNU emacs, (apart from the fact that
     GNU emacs has given up Mule), in Xemacs you can type `a either
     using the ancient iso-accents-mode or by quail and you will obtain
     à.  Later you can save that char in UTF8 or in latin-1 etc. In GNU
     emacs you cannot use iso-accents-mode since this is unibyte.