TeX Live 2017 released

TeX Live 2017 has been released! CTAN mirrors are busy updating. Get out bottles of good wine, and enjoy a good long download 😉

Besides the huge amount of package updates due to the 2 month testing hiatus, I want to pick a few changes before copying the complete changelog entry:

Additional TEXMF trees

tlmgr got a new functionality to easily add and remove additional TEXMF trees to the search path. MikTeX had this features since long, and it was often requested. As it turned out, it is a rather trivial thing to achieve by some texmf.cnf lines. The rest is just front end in tlmgr. Here a few invocations (not very intelligent usage, though):

$ tlmgr conf auxtrees show
tlmgr: no auxiliary texmf trees defined.
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees add /projects/book-abc
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees
List of auxiliary texmf trees:
  /projects/book-abc
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees remove /projects/book-abc
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees show
tlmgr: no auxiliary texmf trees defined.

TeX Live Manager interactive shell

tlmgr also got an interactive shell now, that can also be used for scripting. Available commands are all the usual command line actions, plus a few more (see documentation). Again, here a simple session:

$ tlmgr shell
protocol 1
tlmgr> load local
OK
tlmgr> load remote
tlmgr: package repositories
	main = /home/norbert/public_html/tlnet (verified)
	koma = http://www.komascript.de/repository/texlive/2017 (verified)
OK
tlmgr> update --list
tlmgr: package repositories
	main = /home/norbert/public_html/tlnet (verified)
	koma = http://www.komascript.de/repository/texlive/2017 (verified)
tlmgr: saving backups to /home/norbert/tl/2017/tlpkg/backups
tlmgr: no updates available
OK
tlmgr> byebye
$

User versus System mode for updmap and fmtutil

I have reported on this during BachoTeX/TUG 2017, here are the slides, that the two central configuration programs updmap and fmtutil will change their operation mode slightly by disallowing invocations without mde specification. That is, one either needs to call updmap -sys (or updmap-sys, nothing changed here from previous years) or updmap -user (or updmap-user, new in TeX Live 2017). We hope by this and the accompanying web page of recommendations to help users not to shoot themselves to often by calling updmap without knowing the consequences.

The upcoming proceedings of the BachoTeX will also comtain an article fully documenting both updmap and fmtutil including the most recent changes.

These were only a few changes where I had my fingers in the development. For the full list, read on below.

Now get ready for partying, and also for the end of the peace, because daily package updates will restart in the next days.

Enjoy

Changes since TeX Live 2016

The following list of changes is directly from the TeX Live documentation.

• LuaTEX: More callbacks, more typesetting control, more access to internals; ffi library for dynamic code loading added on some platforms.
• pdfTEX: Environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH_TEX_PRIMITIVES from last year renamed to FORCE_SOURCE_DATE, with no changes in functionality; if the \pdfpageattr token list contains the string /MediaBox, omit output of the default /MediaBox.
• XeTEX: Unicode/OpenType math now based on HarfBuzz’s MATH table support; some bug fixes.
• Dvips: Make the last papersize special win, for consistency with dvipdfmx and package expectations; the -L0 option (L0 config setting) restores the previous behavior of the first special winning.
• epTEX, eupTEX: New primitives \pdfuniformdeviate, \pdfnormaldeviate, \pdfrandomseed, \pdfsetrandomseed, \pdfelapsedtime, \pdfresettimer, from pdfTEX.
• MacTEX: As of this year, only Mac OS X releases for which Apple still releases security patches will be supported in MacTEX, under the platform name x86_64-darwin; currently this means Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra (10.10 and newer). Binaries for older Mac OS X versions are not included in MacTEX, but are still available in TEX Live (x86_64-darwinlegacy, i386-darwin, powerpc-darwin).
• Infrastructure: The TEXMFLOCAL tree is now searched before TEXMFSYSCONFIG and TEXMFSYSVAR (by default); the hope is that this will better match expectations of local files overriding system files. Also, tlmgr has a new mode shell for interactive and scripted use, and a new action conf auxtrees to easily add and remove extra trees.
• updmap and fmtutil: These scripts now give a warning when invoked without explicitly specifying either so-called system mode (updmap-sys, fmtutil-sys, or option -sys), or user mode (updmap-user, fmtutil-user, or option -user). The hope is that this will reduce the perennial problem of invoking user mode by accident and thus losing future system updates. See http://tug.org/texlive/scripts-sys-user.html and an upcoming TUGboat article for details.
• install-tl: Personal paths are now set to MacTEX values (~/Library/...) by default on Macs. New option -init-from-profile to start an installation with the values from a given profile; new command P to explicitly save a profile; new profile variable names (but previous ones are still accepted).
• SyncTEX: the temporary file name now looks like foo.synctex(busy), instead of foo.synctex.gz(busy) (no .gz). Front ends and build systems that want to remove temp files may need adjusting.
• Other utilities: texosquery-jre8 is a new cross-platform program for retrieving locale and other OS information from a TEX document; it is included in shell_escape_commands by default for restricted shell execution. (Older JRE versions are supported by texosquery, but cannot be enabled in restricted mode, as they are no longer supported by Oracle, even for security issues.)
• Platforms: See MacTEX entry above; no other changes.