AucTeX not working as expected

[J K]

Hello all, I have an installation of AuCTeX, and I was reading the
online documentation from the gnu website about how to use it. From the
site > If you want to change font attributes of existing text, mark it
as a region, and then invoke the commands. If no region is selected, the
command will be inserted with empty braces, and you can start typing the
changed text.

The problem is that when I do mark a region and then invoke a command,
such as C-c C-f C-i for italics, it's as if there is no text marked. It
just makes a line with
\textit{} and places point between the braces. Does anyone have any
ideas on this? I am using auctex 11.84 and emacs version 21.4.2
Thanks.

[David Kastrup]

Redirected to comp.emacs (gnu.emacs is, as far as I can tell, not a
really active group).

Post by J K
Hello all, I have an installation of AuCTeX, and I was reading the
online documentation from the gnu website about how to use it. From
the site > If you want to change font attributes of existing text,
mark it as a region, and then invoke the commands. If no region is
selected, the command will be inserted with empty braces, and you can
start typing the changed text.
The problem is that when I do mark a region and then invoke a command,
such as C-c C-f C-i for italics, it's as if there is no text marked.
It just makes a line with
\textit{} and places point between the braces. Does anyone have any
ideas on this? I am using auctex 11.84 and emacs version 21.4.2
Thanks.

The region must be actively marked. In Emacs 22.1, there are various
ways to do this temporarily (including marking with the mouse). In
21.4, however, this only works when transient-mark-mode has been
enabled.

But you really should switch to Emacs 22.1.