2.10 Filling

Filling deals with the insertion of line breaks to prevent lines from becoming wider than what is specified in fill-column. The linebreaks will be inserted automatically if auto-fill-mode is enabled. In this case the source is not only filled but also indented automatically as you write it.

auto-fill-mode can be enabled for AUCTeX by calling turn-on-auto-fill in one of the hooks AUCTeX is running. See Modes and Hooks. As an example, if you want to enable auto-fill-mode in LaTeX-mode, put the following into your init file:

(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill) 

You can manually fill explicitely marked regions, paragraphs, environments, complete sections, or the whole buffer. (Note that manual filling in AUCTeX will indent the start of the region to be filled in contrast to many other Emacs modes.)

There are some syntactical constructs which are handled specially with regard to filling. These are so-called code comments and paragraph commands.

Code comments are comments preceded by code or text in the same line. Upon filling a region, code comments themselves will not get filled. Filling is done from the start of the region to the line with the code comment and continues after it. In order to prevent overfull lines in the source code, a linebreak will be inserted before the last non-comment word by default. This can be changed by customizing LaTeX-fill-break-before-code-comments. If you have overfull lines with code comments you can fill those explicitely by calling LaTeX-fill-paragraph or pressing M-q with the cursor positioned on them. This will add linebreaks in the comment and indent subsequent comment lines to the column of the comment in the first line of the code comment. In this special case M-q only acts on the current line and not on the whole paragraph.

Lines with ‘\par’ are treated similarly to code comments, i.e. ‘\par’ will be treated as paragraph boundary which should not be followed by other code or text. But it is not treated as a real paragraph boundary like an empty line where filling a paragraph would stop.

Paragraph commands like ‘\section’ or ‘\noindent’ (the list of commands is defined by LaTeX-paragraph-commands) are often to be placed in their own line(s). This means they should not be consecuted with any preceding or following adjacent lines of text. AUCTeX will prevent this from happening if you do not put any text except another macro after the end of the last brace of the respective macro. If there is other text after the macro, AUCTeX regards this as a sign that the macro is part of the following paragraph.

Here are some examples:

\begin{quote}   text text text text 

\begin{quote}\label{foo}   text text text text 

If you press M-q on the first line in both examples, nothing will change. But if you write

\begin{quote} text   text text text text 

and press M-q, you will get

\begin{quote} text text text text text 

Besides code comments and paragraph commands, another speciality of filling in AUCTeX involves commented lines. You should be aware that these comments are treated as islands in the rest of the LaTeX code if syntactic filling is enabled. This means, for example, if you try to fill an environment with LaTeX-fill-environment and have the cursor placed on a commented line which does not have a surrounding environment inside the comment, AUCTeX will report an error.

The relevant commands and variables with regard to filling are:

C-c C-q C-p

LaTeX-fill-paragraph will fill and indent the current paragraph.

M-q

Alias for C-c C-q C-p

C-c C-q C-e

LaTeX-fill-environment will fill and indent the current environment. This may e.g. be the ‘document’ environment, in which case the entire document will be formatted.

C-c C-q C-s

LaTeX-fill-section will fill and indent the current logical sectional unit.

C-c C-q C-r

LaTeX-fill-region will fill and indent the current region.

user option LaTeX-fill-break-at-separators

List of separators before or after which respectively linebreaks will be inserted if they do not fit into one line. The separators can be curly braces, brackets, switches for inline math (‘$’, ‘\(’, ‘\)’) and switches for display math (‘\[’, ‘\]’). Such formatting can be useful to make macros and math more visible or to prevent overfull lines in the LaTeX source in case a package for displaying formatted TeX output inside the Emacs buffer, like preview-latex, is used.

user option LaTeX-fill-break-before-code-comments

Code comments are comments preceded by some other text in the same line. When a paragraph containing such a comment is to be filled, the comment start will be seen as a border after which no line breaks will be inserted in the same line. If the option LaTeX-fill-break-before-code-comments is enabled (which is the default) and the comment does not fit into the line, a line break will be inserted before the last non-comment word to minimize the chance that the line becomes overfull.

user option LaTeX-fill-excluded-macros

A list of macro names (without leading backslash) for whose arguments filling should be disabled. Typically, you will want to add macros here which have long, multi-line arguments. An example is \pgfplotstabletypeset from the pgfplotstable package which is used as shown in the following listing:

\pgfplotstabletypeset[skip first n=4]{%
  XYZ Format,
  Version 1.234
  Date 2010-09-01
  @author Mustermann
  A B C
  1 2 3
  4 5 6
}