Pretesting TeX Live

We, and all TeX Live users, greatly appreciate all testing of TeX Live before the official release. The more people who do so, the better the final release can be. It is also the best opportunity to influence and improve the behavior of TL. For dates and deadlines, please see the TeX Live home page.

Please try it if you like, but not with the expectation that “everything should work perfectly” (it won't), but rather “I'll try this out and see if I can help improve it”.

On this page: downloading - installing - testing - updating - reporting - news.

Downloading

You can retrieve the pretest files from one of these hosts: copy-paste an http or ftp url when running the installer directly, or use an rsync url for mirroring, as described below. (Our thanks to these sites for making their space and bandwidth available.)

You can either do a network installation of TL or mirror the whole directory:

• To do a network installation, download either install-tl-unx.tar.gz (Unix) or install-tl.zip (larger; Windows or Unix), unpack it, and run the included install-tl script, as described below. (To reiterate: you must use install-tl from the pretest; trying to work with a TL installation from previous years will fail completely.)

• To mirror the whole directory, rsync is the most efficient method:
  rsync -a --delete --exclude="mactex*" rsync://somemirror/some/path/ /your/local/dir
  After mirroring the directory, run the install-tl script, as below.

  You can use wget or other tools to mirror via http or ftp if rsync is not available. Regardless of the method used, do not fail to exclude the mactex* file or you will be doubling the (already large) transfer.

  On the other hand, if you are only interested in MacTeX, you might choose just to mirror/download that one mactex* file, which is self-contained.

The pretest build runs nightly, ending around 5am Denmark time unless something goes wrong. The mirror hosts should all be up to date within a couple of hours after that.

Installing

After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl.bat (Windows) to perform the installation:

• install-tl -repository location -gui text for text (command line) mode; this is the default on Unix.
• install-tl -repository location -gui wizard for a maximally simplified GUI installation asking only the minimal questions; this is the default on Windows.
• install-tl -repository location -gui perltk for advanced/expert GUI installation with the usual array of options; requires Perl/Tk (shipped with TL on Windows, must be installed independently on Unix).

If you are performing a network installation, the pretest repository location from which to install must be specified, as shown in these examples (see downloading above for finding the value for location), and the location must be an ftp or http url (not rsync).

But in the case of installing from your own mirrored repository, you should omit -repository location from the given command lines.

For information on all of the installer options, run install-tl --help, or see the install-tl documentation page.

Testing

After a successful installation, please first try simple test documents, such as latex small2e. If that works, even more useful is to try your real-life documents, to check that they still work as expected.

Updating

After a successful installation, you can update from the tlpretest repository using tlmgr from time to time, if you wish. In the event of unusually drastic changes during the pretest you may have to reinstall.

Reporting problems

Please email bug reports, suggestions, comments on TeX Live itself (the installation process, tlmgr, etc.) to tex-live@tug.org (archive). Bugs about specific packages should be reported to the package maintainers; TeX Live's job is to install (some of) what is on CTAN, not make changes on top of it. Resources for general questions and help using TeX are available separately.

Notable changes

The main TeX Live documentation and translations are not yet fully updated. Meanwhile, aside from the pervasive updates to new releases of packages and programs, here is a terse list of major user-visible changes:

General

This release of TeX Live includes Knuth's TeX tune-up of 2014; the only visible change likely is the restoration of “preloaded format” on the banner line. Per Knuth, this reflects the format that will be loaded by default, rather than an undumped format that is actually preloaded; and it may be overridden in various ways.

LaTeX2e (full LaTeX2e news)

A new release of LaTeX2e has a variety of bug fixes and other changes. Perhaps most notably, inputenc will now give an error when running under XeTeX or LuaTeX (not TeX or pdfTeX) and the specified encoding is not either utf8 or ascii; before, accented characters could get silently dropped from the output. (It is better not to use inputenc with the Unicode engines in the first place.) This creates a known incompatibility with the europecv package, due to the latter's strange loading pattern. We hope a fixed europecv will be forthcoming, and that other incompatibilities are nonexistent.

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

Sync with Knuth TeX 3.14159265 and e-TeX 2.6; new warning-suppression parameter \pdfsuppresswarningpagegroup; new primitives for fake interword spaces: \pdfinterwordspaceon, \pdfinterwordspaceoff, \pdffakespace.

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

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

xetex (full XeTeX news)

Same image formats 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 (full MetaPost news)

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

pstopdf (ConTeXt utility)

has been removed as a standalone command, 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 just in the scripts/ directory rather than user-level executables (this can be changed if it turns out to be problematic). A new script (psjoin) has been added.

MacTeX

The MacTeX redistribution of TeX Live no longer includes the optional Mac-only packages for Latin Modern and TeX Gyre (easy enough for users to install them if they want them), or the convert program from ImageMagick (since tex4ht.env now uses Ghostscript directly). The included Ghostscript is now version 9.10.

CJK language collection

now split by language, for more comparable sizes.

Platforms

x86_64-cygwin added, mips-irix removed. Support for some additional platforms is/will be available as custom binaries.

If you find other important changes that should be noted, please report them.