[AUCTeX-devel] Re: Please add support for caption's optional argument

[David Kastrup]

[Redirecting this reply to the appropriate AUCTeX list]

frank <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm back again somehow to the free software community,

Nice to hear that.

> but I won't have time to read the auctex list in the near future.
> However, I'll start again to bomb you with bug reports and feature
> requests.  Additionally, I'd be oblidged if somebody keeps me
> informed about the progress in merging AUCTeX and preview-latex,
> because I think that quite some discussion might be needed within
> Debian for this (e.g. regarding XEmacs support), and I offer to take
> part in this.

The next release will be merged.  There will be no more standalone
releases of either software.  The original intent had been to keep
preview-latex at least separately buildable within the AUCTeX tree.
It does not look like this is the case currently (since the
documentation has been mostly merged), and there is little point in
letting people combine non-matching versions of AUCTeX and
preview-latex.  The XEmacs sumo package obviously contains an AUCTeX
of older vintage right now.  A separate XEmacs AUCTeX package would
need to shadow that.  The current load-path of XEmacs as distributed
by Debian is such an awful mess that it would not appear to offer a
sensible place for that.

> I would suggest to add a toggle that allows to switch from the current
> behavior (appropriate for short captions) to either of the following
> two:
>
> - Ask for some text for the short-form of the caption, insert this text
>   as \caption's optional argument, and put point between the empty
>   braces of the mandatory argument
>
> - Like above, but copy the short text into the mandatory argument for
>   further editing and add TeX-default-caption-separator after the text,
>   which defaults to nothing, but could usefully be redefined by the user
>   to ": " or the like (point at the end of the inserted text).
>
> Maybe this toggle could be actually two different ones: One for figure,
> one for table, because I don't use long table captions most of the time.

Well, how about making it a number, and have AUCTeX ask for a short
title if you exceed that many characters and/or have \\ or a fragile
command in the caption?

Ok, not fair to make your mouth water and the other developers curse
me...

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum