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

[frank]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> The next release will be merged.  There will be no more standalone
> releases of either software.

So the Debian people really should get together.

> 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.

Since I don't use XEmacs, I don't have any experience with this.  Is
there any Debian user among the AUCTeX developers who would like to join
me (us) when we raise this issue on the Debian emacsen mailing list?
(Or maybe it even should be the policy mailinglist, I'm unsure about the
status of the emacsen policy.)

>> 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?

Actually I don't see the benefit.  What I don't like in the current
behavior is not only that I need to copy (and possibly edit) the
beginning of the caption for the short title, but also that AUCTeX
expects that I type the complete caption in the minibuffer.  With the
number solution, I would have to type at least #number characters in the
minibuffer, without being able to use shortcuts to insert macros.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer