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 latex.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.

• Fix remove-style feature

  Currently TeX-remove-style implementation isn’t good. It is common practice that major mode functions directly add macros and environments via TeX-add-symbols and LaTeX-add-environments, but those macros and environments are lost once TeX-remove-style runs. It is necessary to run major mode function, by e.g. normal-mode, again to recover them, but that makes no point in running TeX-remove-style itself because major mode function kills all buffer-local variables.

  As of AUCTeX 12.3, TeX-remove-style is no longer used by any other codes.

• Factor out syntax propertization from font-latex.el

  Syntax propertization is implemented in font-latex.el. This means that features which depend on syntax parse don’t work well for tex-font.el users and those who disable font lock.

  Hence syntax propertization should be factored out from font-latex.el and implemented as a major mode facility.

  (Texinfo mode is an exception because it already has its own syntax propertize function, which just copies the one available in Emacs built-in texinfo mode.)

• Add documentation

  Following entries should be included in the document:

  • - Variables LaTeX-insert-into-comments, TeX-translate-location-hook
  • - How to use TeX-auto-add-type, as well as functions and variables generated by that macro. They should be covered in the node Hacking the Parser.
  • - Usage of ConTeXt mode