Intro

[Jan Braun]

Good morning everyone!

First of all: thank you for your ongoing support in 
writing this cool software. 

I’d like to introduce myself.  My name is Jan, I am an 
old timer, using Emacs since version 18.  Soon after 
that I was introduced to LaTeX (being still 2.09) and 
short after that to AUCTeX (on Emacs-19.2 or 19.3 if 
I recall correct.) 

Since those days I have rarely used anything else, to 
write my LaTeX files.  Occasionally TeXnicCenter or 
TeXStudio, when I am giving LaTeX courses.

After leaving university---well, that phrase is not 
correct, I never left university, as I am staff member 
till today.  How about that: after finishing my Diploma 
and being in the business the opportunities to use LaTeX 
and Emacs declined, as was to expect, but there were
always some special fields.

I am enthusiast Emacs user, prefer free software wherever 
I can, but please don’t blame me, that my employer was so 
kind, to provide me a MacOS based computer.  (The only 
other choice would have been a Windows based computer 
with massive restricted account and no admin 
permissions …)  Most time of the day I am working on 
MacOS, its fine, its reliable and it very much Unix like,
which is OK to me.

At the time of writing this, I have a real bunch of small 
projects, which will eventually come together some day.  
Most of the projects are related to the creation of LaTeX 
based style files.  Instead of just writing them as quick 
and dirty as well as undocumented style files, I am now 
digging into Doc and Docstrip (and even LaTeX3).

This is the reason, why I joined this list.  Somethings 
rotten in my system (although it is not danish ;-)).  I 
was able to start a clean Emacsen (v27.2 of Nov. 2021).  
I used options —no-init-file and —no-site-file to start 
Emacs.  In scratch buffer I added and evaled

(add-to-list 'load-path 
   "~/.emacs.d/elpa/auctex-13.1.1")
(load "auctex.el" nil t t)

only to find out, that it looks exactly the same, as if 
I had started Emacs and loaded my full-grown ~/.emacs 
file with 20+ years of adding more and more functions.
 
Most noteably and in contrast to one of the screenshots, 
you offer on the official AUCTeX site 
(https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/img/auctex-screenshot-doctex.png) 
my buffer looks crooked.  The grey background color on 
the documentation parts in my buffer only stretches as 
far, as the text line goes.  That makes the look very 
flimsy?  (I can provide a screenshot, if thats OK for 
you?)

Also, a lot of usual DocTeX commands are unknown and 
have to be typed in completely by hand (i.e. no auto-
completion).  For example, I always have to type in 
`C-c C-e macrocode RET’.  Although AUCTeX pretends 
to not know this environment, it is inserted almost 
correctly, i.e. the `%    \begin{macrocode}’  and 
`%    \end{macrocode’ blocks are inserted.  But I am 
a bit disappointed, that the line between begin and 
end still has the percent sign, which should 
definitely not be there in the first place.

So before opening a bug report, which later turns out 
to be evidence of my stupidity, I’d thought, I’d ask 
here for some advice.

Bye 

   Jan

-- 
Jan Braun (er/ihm, he/him)
Jan.Braun@klein-gallien.org


=== ypchsh /usr/local/bin/emacs === go FORTH now … ===