Get the champagne out of the fridge, call your typographic friends, make a party – TeX Live 2014 has been released. Announcement has been delayed to give CTAN a chance to catch up, so now all mirrors should be ready.

Over the last two months we have worked hard to get rid of as many bugs as possible, and the last month has seen freeze in preparation for the DVD. All together, it is better than ever – below you can find the notable changes as mentioned on the TUG TeX Live Documentations page.

From the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) side there are not many changes, just the usual small changes here and there. But this also means that upgrades should be easy to do. I will probably adjust the current updater to allow switching from TL2013 to TL2014 without reinstalling everything – but honestly, so many packages have changed in the meantime, that updates will be anyway all over the place.

So – head over to the TUG page of TeX Live and choose your installation method!

Thanks

Thanks goes as usual to a long long list of of contributors: Karl Berry for managing all the different things and keeping on top of all of it. Peter Breitenlohner for building the best build system, fixing incredible amounts of bugs, and being our absolute guru. All the builders of binaries for the many different platforms – often going through long iterations to fix particularities on specific systems. The great team of documentation writers and translators – helping us to make TeX Live accessible in all corners of the world.

And last but not least – all the great upstream maintainers, writers of TeX macros, font packages, etc. Those who keep TeX Live ever growing each year. Thanks to all of you!

Without all of you we would not have TeX (Live)!

News from the TeX Live Documentation

2014 saw another TeX tune-up from Knuth; this affected all engines, but the only visible change likely is the restoration of the preloaded format string on the banner line. Per Knuth, this now reflects the format that would be loaded by default, rather than an undumped format that is actually preloaded in the binary; it may be overridden in various ways.

pdfTeX: new warning-suppression parameter \pdfsuppresswarningpagegroup; new primitives for fake interword spaces to help with PDF text reflowing: \pdfinterwordspaceon, \pdfinterwordspaceoff, \pdffakespace.

LuaTeX: Notable changes and fixes were made to font loading and hyphenation. The biggest addition is a new engine variant, luajittex and its siblings texluajit and texluajitc. This uses a just-in-time Lua compiler (detailed TUGboat article). luajittex is still in development, is not available on all platforms, and is considerably less stable than luatex. Neither we nor its developers recommend using it except for the specific purpose of experimenting with jit on Lua code.

XeTeX: The same image formats are now supported on all platforms (including Mac); avoid Unicode compatibility decomposition fallback (but not other variants); prefer OpenType to Graphite fonts, for compatibility with previous XeTeX versions.

MetaPost: A new numbersystem decimal is supported, along with a companion internal numberprecision; a new definition of drawdot in plain.mp, per Knuth; bug fixes in SVG and PNG output, among others.

The pstopdf ConTeXt utility will be removed as a standalone command at some point after the release, due to conflicts with OS utilities of the same name. It can still (and now) be invoked as mtxrun –script pstopdf.

psutils has been substantially revised by a new maintainer. As a result, several seldom-used utilities (fix*, getafm, psmerge, showchar) are now only in the scripts/ directory rather than being user-level executables (this can be reversed if it turns out to be problematic). A new script, psjoin, has been added.

The MacTeX redistribution of TeX Live no longer includes the optional Mac-only packages for the Latin Modern and TeX Gyre fonts, since it is easy enough for individual users to make them available to the system. The convert program from ImageMagick has also been excised, since TeX4ht (specifically tex4ht.env) now uses Ghostscript directly.

The langcjk collection for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean support has been split into individual language collections for the sake of more moderate sizes.

Platforms: x86_64-cygwin added, mips-irix removed; Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP, so our programs may start failing there at any time.

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.