[Tex/LaTex] Modifying the font head and size inside \section in emacs editor

emacs

I am running Emacs 23 with AUCTeX for editing LaTeX source files. I'd like to be able to customise the font head and size of the section name.

To make things absolutely clear, the font inside the \section{} command, becomes slightly bigger in size and into a font head different from the rest of the buffer. Is it possible to customize this behaviour?

Best Answer

Put the cursor inside the curly brackets in \section{} (with some words inside the curly brackets), then type

M-x customize-face RET RET

and you will see the set of customisations for that face. In my emacs they are

enter image description here

You need to change the scale in height to make it bigger/smaller, and you can change the colour in foreground. Don't forget to save for future sessions and to save your options so your customisations won't be lost.

Another two useful commands to customise faces in Emacs are

M-x list-faces-display

which lists all faces in the display and

M-x customize-group RET font-latex-highlighting-faces RET

to customise the latex-related faces.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Subscript font size in Emacs TeX mode

You need to customise the "subscript face". To do it globally, do M-x customize-face, then hit return to customise all faces. That brings up a whole slew of options. If you search (usual Emacs search works) for subscript then you'll find the setting for subscripts (and superscripts should be nearby). Click on Show Face to see its details. There may be a sneaky way to copy from another face, but the easiest way is to find one you want and click on its Show Face to see its details (that's why I said to customise all faces, if you know just what you want then you can go straight to subscript and superscript). You can then save this for the session, or save it for all time, by clicking on the State button.

[Tex/LaTex] Uninformative error message when using AUCTeX

AUCTeX 11.89

Starting from this version of AUCTeX, the option TeX-file-line-error enables by default the file:line:error messages that solve the problem. Thus, from this version you shouldn't run anymore into this kind of problems. I also suggest to revert any change to LaTeX-command-style, in order to be sure to use the default value.

See below for previous versions.

AUCTeX 11.88 or earlier

Instead of editing the texmf.cnf file you can just add -file-line-error option to your TeX processor. To do this add the following code to your .emacs:

(setq LaTeX-command-style '(("" "%(PDF)%(latex) -file-line-error %S%(PDFout)")))

See also the AUCTeX FAQ:

8. Why does TeX-next-error (C-c `) fail?

When writing the log file, TeX puts information related to a file, including error messages, between a pair of parentheses. AUCTeX determines the file where the error happened by parsing the log file and counting the parentheses. This can fail when there are other, unbalanced parentheses present.

As a workaround you can activate so-called file:line:error messages for the log file. (Those are are easier to parse, but may lack some details.) Either you do this in the configuration of your TeX system (consult its manual to see where this is) or you add a command line switch to the (la)tex call, e.g. by customizing LaTeX-command-style or TeX-command-list.

Note: already answered here.