AUC TeX contains very advanced handling of indentation and
reformatting of the LaTeX source. If you have already tried AUC
TeX with auto-fill-mode enabled, you may have noted that the
source is automatically indented and formatted as you write it. More
over, AUC TeX is able to format sections of text on demand.
It is important to realize, that AUC TeX comes with `formatting' in two fashions. Either letting TeX format the file, or letting AUC TeX make the ASCII document look better.
Indentation is done by LaTeX environments and by TeX groups, that
is the body of an environment is indented by the value of
LaTeX-indent-level (default 2). Also, items of an `itemize-like'
environment are indented by the value of LaTeX-item-indent,
default -2. This indentation makes it easier to see the
structure of the document, and to catch errors such as a missing close
brace. Thus, the indentation is done for precisely the same reasons
that you would indent ordinary computer programs.
The following is a short sample of an itemize environment indented by AUC TeX. If more environment are nested, they are indented `accumulated' just like most programming languages usually are seen indented in nested constructs.
\begin{itemize}
\item Insertion of templates for logical-structural compositions such as
environments and sections.
\item Hot-keys for easy access to certain often used constructs, e.g.,
font changes, accented letters, and mathematical symbols.
\item Running application programs (such as \TeX), and then parsing
the output so that errors in the document may be located
easily.
\item Support for multi-file documents.
\item Online help for \AllTeX\ error messages.
\item Outlining\Dash i.e., manipulating the document as a composition
of nested/sequential logical constructs.
\item Instant formatting and indentation of the \ascii-document in
order to make it easier to read.
\item `Completion' (and thereby spell-checking) of partially written
control sequences.
\end{itemize}
You can format and indent single lines, paragraphs, environments, or sections.
LaTeX-indent-line will indent the current line.
reindent-then-newline-and-indent indents the current line, and
then inserts a new line (much like ret) and move the cursor to an
appropriate position by the left margin.
LaTeX-format-paragraph will reformat or `fill' the current
paragraph.
LaTeX-format-environment will reformat or `fill' the current
environment. This may e.g. be the `document' environment, in which case
the entire document will be formatted.
LaTeX-format-section will reformat or `fill' the current
logical sectional unit.
LaTeX-format-region will format or `fill' the current region.
Warning: The formatting cannot handle tabular-like environments. Those will be completely messed-up if you try to format them.