TeX Live 2013 released

In the last hours Karl Berry has finally put the release 2013 of TeX Live online. That means that new installations from tlnet will use the 2013 package base. But be warned, mirror updates will take some time.

Taking from the news section of the TeX Live manual, here are the news awaiting us in TeX Live 2013:

• Distribution layout: the top-level texmf/ directory has been merged into texmf-dist/, for simplicity. Both the TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFDIST Kpathsea variables now point to texmf-dist.
• Many small language collections have been merged together, to simplify installation.
• MetaPost: native support for PNG output and floating-point (IEEE double) has been added.
• LuaTEX: updated to Lua 5.2, and includes a new library (pdfscanner) to process external PDF page content, among much else (see its web pages).
• XeTEX:
  • The HarfBuzz library now used for font layout instead of ICU. (ICU is still used to support input encodings, bidirectionality, and the optional Unicode line breaking.)
  • Graphite2 and HarfBuzz are used instead of SilGraphite for Graphite layout.
  • On Macs, Core Text is used instead of the (deprecated) ATSUI.
  • Prefer TrueType/OpenType fonts to Type1 when the names are the same.
  • Fix occasional mismatch in font finding between XeTEX and xdvipdfmx.
  • Support OpenType math cut-ins.
• xdvi: now uses FreeType instead of t1lib for rendering.
• microtype.sty: some support for XeTEX (protrusion) and LuaTEX (protrusion, font expansion, tracking), among other enhancements.
• tlmgr: new pinning action to ease configuring multiple repositories; that section in tlmgr --help has more, online at http://tug.org/texlive/doc/tlmgr.html#MULTIPLE-REPOSITORIES.
• Platforms: armhf-linux, mips-irix, i386-netbsd, and amd64-netbsd added or revived; powerpc-aix removed. Support for some additional platforms is available as custom binaries. In addition, some platforms are omitted from the DVD (simply to save space), but can be installed normally over the net.

Debian/sid is already at this level, other big distributions, too.

What comes next? First we will ship out some binary updates (for the first time!) for XeTeX and pdfTeX binaries. And of course, the usual package updates will commence sooner or later, after all the parties have finished and we can think straight again.

Time to party!