In this paper we describe several new aspects of the foundations of the representation theory of the space of smooth-automorphic forms (i.e., not necessarily \(K_\infty \) -finite automorphic forms) for general connected reductive groups over number fields. Our role model for this space of smooth-automorphic forms is a “smooth version” of the space of automorphic forms, whose internal structure was the topic of Franke’s famous paper (Ann Sci de l’ENS 2:181–279, 1998). We prove that the important decomposition along the parabolic support, and the even finer—and structurally more important—decomposition along the cuspidal support of automorphic forms transfer in a topologized version to the larger setting of smooth-automorphic forms. In this way, we establish smooth-automorphic versions of the main results of Franke and Schwermer (Math Ann 311:765–790, 1998) and of Mœglin and Waldspurger (Spectral Decomposition and Eisenstein Series, Cambridge University Press, 1995), III.2.6.
