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.

Mid-term Goals
==============

  * Integration of previewlatex into AUCTeX

     As of AUCTeX 11.81 previewlatex is a part of AUCTeX in the sense that the installation routines were merged and previewlatex 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.

  * More flexible option and command handling

     The current state of command handling with TeX-command-list is not very flexible because there is no distinction between executables and command line options to be passed to them.

     Customization of TeX-command-list by the user will interfere with updates of AUCTeX.

  * 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.

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.

  * Spell checking of macros

     A special ispell dictionary for macros could be nice to have.

  * Quick error overviews

     An error overview window (extract from the log file with just the error lines, clickable like a ``grep'' buffer) and/or 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.

  * Poor man's Source Specials In particular in PDF mode (and where Source Specials cause problems), alternatives would be desirable.  One could implement inverse search by something like Heiko Oberdiek's vpe.sty, and forward search by using the .aux file info to correlate labels in the text (possibly in cooperation with RefTeX) with previewer pages.

     In AUCTeX 11.83, support for forward search with PDF files was added. Currently this only works if you use the pdfsync LaTeX package and xpdf as your PDF viewer. See Viewing.

  * 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.

  * Multiple argument completion for \bibliography.  In general, I ought to make , special for these kind of completions.

  * Suggest makindex when appropriate.

  * 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.

  * The parser should catch warnings about undefined crossreferences. Suggested by Richard Hirsch i3080501@ws.rz.tu-bs.de.

  * 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 previewlatex, 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>.

  * Make features.

     A new command TeX-update (C-c C-u) could be used to create an up-to-date dvi file by repeatedly running BibTeX, MakeIndex and (La)TeX, until an error occurs or we are done.

     An alternative is to have an Update command that ensures the dvi file is up to date.  This could be called before printing and previewing.

  * 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

  * Completion for counters and sboxes.

  * 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.

  * Make TeX-next-error parse ahead and store the results in a list, using markers to remember buffer positions in order to be more robust with regard to line numbers and changed files.  This is what next-error does. (Or did, until Emacs 19).

  * 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.

Bugs
====

  * The parsed files and style hooks for example.dtx, example.sty, example.drv and example.bib all clash.  Bad.

  * 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.

  * Syntax highlighting of LaTeX constructs spanning more than one line sometimes stops in the middle of the construct.  Highlighting can get lost during typing. (XEmacs only)

  * No syntactic font locking of verbatim macros and environments. (XEmacs only)

  * Font locking inside of verbatim macros and environments is not inhibited.  This may result in syntax highlighting of unbalanced dollar signs and the like spilling out of the verbatim content. (XEmacs only)

  * Folding of LaTeX constructs spanning more than one line may result in overfull lines. (XEmacs only)