Future Development of AUCTeX **************************** 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. 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. 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 . * Command to insert a macrodefinition in the preamble, without moving point from the current location. Suggested by "Jeffrey C. Ely" . * 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 . * 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 '. * Option not to calculate very slow completions like for 'C-c C-m include '. * 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 ''. * Make AUCTeX work with 'crypt++'. Suggested by Chris Moore ''. * 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 ''. * 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 ''. * 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'. 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]+\\|.\\)"' -- '' 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. Future Development of preview-latex *********************************** * Support other formats than just LaTeX plain TeX users and ConTeXt users should not have to feel left out. While ConTeXt is not supported yet by released versions of AUCTeX, at least supporting plain would help people, and be a start for ConTeXt as well. There are plain-based formats like MusiXTeX that could benefit a lot from preview-latex. The main part of the difficulties here is to adapt 'preview.dtx' to produce stuff not requiring LaTeX. * Support nested snippets Currently you can't have both a footnote (which gets displayed as just its footnote number) and math inside of a footnote rendered as an image: such nesting might be achieved by rerunning preview-latex on the footnote contents when one opens the footnote for editing. * Support other text properties than just images Macros like '\textit' can be rendered as images, but the resulting humungous blob is not suitable for editing, in particular since the line filling from LaTeX does not coincide with that of Emacs. It would be much more useful if text properties just switched the relevant font to italics rather than replacing the whole text with an image. It would also make editing quite easier. Then there are things like footnotes that are currently just replaced by their footnote number. While editing is not a concern here (the number is not in the original text, anyway), it would save a lot of conversion time if no images were generated, but Emacs just displayed a properly fontified version of the footnote number. Also, this might make preview-latex useful even on text terminals. * Find a way to facilitate Source Specials Probably in connection with adding appropriate support to 'dvipng', it would be nice if clicking on an image from a larger piece of source code would place the cursor at the respective source code location. * Make 'preview.dtx' look reasonable in AUCTeX It is a bit embarrassing that 'preview.dtx' is written in a manner that will not give either good syntax highlighting or good indentation when employing AUCTeX. * Web page work Currently, preview-latex's web page is not structured at all. Better navigation would be desirable, as well as separate News and Errata eye catchers. * Manual improvements - Pepper the manual with screen shots and graphics This will be of interest for the HTML and TeX renditions of the texinfo manual. Since Texinfo now supports images as well, this could well be nice to have. - Fix duplicates Various stuff appears several times. * Implement rendering pipelines for Emacs The current 'gs.el' interface is fundamentally flawed, not only because of a broken implementation. A general batchable and daemonizable rendering infrastructure that can work on all kinds of preview images for embedding into buffers is warranted. The current implementation has a rather adhoc flavor and is not easily extended. It will not work outside of AUCTeX, either. * Integrate into RefTeX When referencing to equations and the like, the preview-images of the source rather than plain text should be displayed. If the preview in question covers labels, those should appear in the bubble help and/or a context menu. Apropos: * Implement LaTeX error indicators Previews on erroneous LaTeX passages might gain a red border or similar. * Pop up relevant online documentation for frequent errors A lot of errors are of the "badly configured" variety. Perhaps the relevant info pages should be delivered in addition to the error message. * Implement a table editing mode where every table cell gets output as a separate preview. Alternatively, output the complete table metrics in a way that lets people click on individual cells for editing purposes. * Benchmark and kill Emacs inefficiencies Both the LaTeX run under Emacs control as well as actual image insertion in Emacs could be faster. CVS Emacs has improved in that respect, but it still is slower than desirable. * Improve image support under Emacs The general image and color handling in Emacs is inefficient and partly defective. This is still the case in CVS. One option would be to replace the whole color and image handling with GDK routines when this library is available, since it has been optimized for it.