Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: Can autctex support metapost?

[David Kastrup]

Stephan Hennig <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup schrieb:
>> Stephan Hennig <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>>> Native support for MetaPost with previewers GSview or AR (using
>>> mptopdf) would be highly welcome.
>> 
>> Well, but it is not really the business of AUCTeX.
>
> No.  BTW, a question that may sound dumb, but what exactly is AUCTeX
> in technical terms?  Is it a major/minor mode (I don't think so), a
> set of lisp macros with key bindings or something completely
> different?

Major modes for plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, Texinfo and some
off-the-wall formats.

> The manual lists several features of AUCTeX.  But I'm more
> interested to know how AUCTeX integrates into Emacs at the technical
> level (without going into details).  The same question applies to
> preview-latex.  Is the latter a minor mode?

Very much so, except that it isn't.  Formally it may be viewed as some
sort of extension to LaTeX-mode, and it takes major mode keybindings.
Historically, it did nothing at all unless you called its functions
(also via the keybindings), so a minor mode seemed sort of overkill.
Nowadays, however, it also takes up menu space for its own menu, so
one probably should at one point of time make it a proper minor mode.
I am not too enthused about the prospects since it is not clear what
should happen if you turn it off: should just the menu disappear,
should the keybindings vanish, should the buffer be cleared from
previews, just visibly or permanently?

>> Except that it would be nice to have Metapost-style font locking
>> inside of emp environments.
>> 
>> But that is a different work area.
>
> I'm looking for the complementary feature: TeX-style font locking
> inside btex..etex et al. (see the bug report mentioned in my
> previous mail).

Yes, that should be similar.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum