AUCTeX 11.51 released

[David Kastrup]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.emacs,comp.emacs.xemacs,comp.text.tex as well.


Release notes for AUCTeX 11.51
==============================

AUCTeX provides by far the most wide-spread and sophisticated
environment for editing LaTeX, TeX, ConTeXt and Texinfo documents with
Emacs or XEmacs.  When combined with packages like RefTeX,
preview-latex, 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, and intelligent indentation and filling
of the text while you enter it.

Documentation and interfaces in this release are still a moving
target, partly due to a lack of volunteers for non-programming tasks:
documentation writing, tutorials, translations, reference material,
sleuth work, testing.  The usual ``volunteers welcome'' applies here.


New features and fixed bugs in this release
-------------------------------------------

This is primarily a bug fix release to the last major release 11.50.
PDFTeX and Source Special support did not work with ConTeXt, this has
been fixed.  Similar for Source Special support under Windows.  Some
more potential installation mistakes are now diagnosed.  Omega support
has been added.  Some user interface changes have been done and other
bugs fixed.

IMPORTANT: Many of the new features rely on special properties in the
variable `TeX-command-list' and will not work if you customized this
variable for a former release of AUCTeX.  If this is the case for you,
please re-initialize the variable by erasing the customization,
thereby setting the variable to the new default, and re-adding your
changes afterwards.  Many such changes can be avoided by using other
customization variables.


Requirements
------------

It is required that you use at least GNU Emacs 21 or XEmacs 21.4 with
AUCTeX.  Support for Emacs 20 has been dropped in favor of getting
more important work done.  Unfortunately, just before release it has
come to our attention that you need 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 because of non-trivial
changes in easy-mmode.el.  Providing backward compatibility to earlier
versions would require resources we don't have right now: none of the
currently active developers actually uses XEmacs.  We apologize for
the inconvenience and hope that you can make use of the XEmacs package
system to upgrade if necessary.


Availability
------------

AUCTeX can be downloaded from <URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/auctex>.
This location is mirrored to the directory support/auctex on CTAN.  It
is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

You'll find more information at the web site of AUCTeX
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex>, including its mailing list
address.


Future development and additional information
---------------------------------------------

AUCTeX is proceeding as a GNU project with the long-term intent of
merging it into Emacs (and merging with preview-latex
<URL:http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net> probably next year).  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 <URL:mailto:address@hidden>.
While Paypal contributions are appreciated, volunteering for tasks
remains the most effective way of helping AUCTeX development.

The following people contributed to this release (in alphabetical
order): Ralf Angeli, Masayuki Ataka, Thomas Baumann, Berend de Boer,
Peter S. Galbraith, Patrick Gundlach, Yvon Hevel, David Kastrup, Frank
Küster, Jan-Åke Larsson, Dan Nicolaescu, Piet van Oostrum, Davide
G. M. Salvetti, Mike Sperber, Reiner Steib, Christian Schlauer, Shiro
Takeda (Please apologize if we forgot somebody.)


-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum