TeX Live 2021 - bugs and updates

Most of TeX Live is a redistribution of packages and programs from elsewhere, primarily CTAN. So, the target for bug reports varies according to the nature of the problem.

• If you have problems with a TeX document, e.g., a package is no longer behaving as it used to, report it to the package maintainer. As a rule, package-specific fixes are not installed directly in TL; instead, new versions of packages should be uploaded to CTAN.
• If you have questions about using TeX, or need help with TeX, please use the general help resources.
• To report a bug in TeX Live installation or infrastructure, email the public mailing list tex-live@tug.org (archives).
• For security-related reports, please use the tlsecurity@tug.org mailing list (private archives).

If you need to use alternate binaries, our recommended approach is the custom binary support in the TL installer.

For information on 64-bit Windows binaries, see the Windows on TeX Live page.

Known issues in TeX Live 2021

• See separate page about log4j.
• In the MetaPost 2.00 included in the original TL'21 release, the btex..etex construct generated a spurious space. This was fixed in MetaPost 2.01, available through post-release network updates. LuaTeX was also updated to 1.13.2, since it includes MetaPost as a library (no other changes to LuaTeX).

Bug archives for the previous release and earlier years remain online (under systems/texlive; both the initial release each year, and the frozen state at the end of the cycle in tlnet-final).

Notable changes

As always, there were pervasive updates to packages and programs (highlights of changes). We can't list them all, but here are some major user-visible changes in the principal programs:

General

• Donald Knuth's changes for his 2021 tuneup of TeX and Metafont are incorporated, and available on CTAN as the knuth-dist and knuth-local packages. As expected, the fixes are for obscure cases and do not affect any behavior in practice.
• Except in original TeX: if \tracinglostchars is set to 3 or more, missing characters will result in an error, not just a message in the log file, and the missing character code will be shown in hex.
• Except in original TeX: a new integer parameter \tracingstacklevels, if positive, and if \tracingmacros is also positive, causes a prefix indicating the macro expansion depth to be output on each relevant log line (e.g., ~.. at depth 2). Also, macro logging is truncated at a depth >= the parameter value.

kpathsea

Nothing major; see full Kpathsea news for details.

aleph

The Aleph-based LaTeX format, named lamed, has been removed, due to new requirements . The aleph binary itself is still included and supported.

eptex, euptex

Nothing major; see full ChangeLogs for details.

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

• Lua 5.3.6.
• Callback for nesting level used in \tracingmacros, as generalized variant of the new \tracingstacklevels.
• Mark math glyphs as protected to prevent processing as text.
• Removed width/ic compensation for traditional math code path.

metapost (full MetaPost news)

• SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH envvar support for reproducible output.
• Avoid wrong final % in mpto.
• Document -T option, other fixes to manual.
• Value of epsilon changed in binary and decimal modes, so mp_solve_rising_cubic works as expected.

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

• New primitives \pdfrunninglinkoff and \pdfrunninglinkon; e.g., for disabling generation of links in headers and footers.
• Warn instead of aborting when “\pdfendlink ended up in different nesting level than \pdfstartlink”.
• Dump \pdfglyphtounicode assignments in fmt file.
• Source: poppler support removed, as it was too hard to keep in sync with upstream. In native TL, pdftex has always used libs/xpdf, which is cut-down and adapted code from xpdf.

ptex (full pTeX news)

Nothing major.

xetex (full XeTeX news)

Fixes for math kerning.

dvipdfmx (full dvipdfmx news)

• Ghostscript is now invoked safely by default; to override (assuming all input files are trusted), use -i dvipdfmx-unsafe.cfg. To use PSTricks with XeTeX:
  xetex -output-driver="xdvipdfmx -i dvipdfmx-unsafe.cfg -q -E" ...
• If an image file is not found, exit with bad status.
• Extended special syntax for color support.
• Specials for manipulating ExtGState.
• Compatibility specials pdfcolorstack and pdffontattr.
• Experimental support for dviluatex's extended fnt_def.
• Support new feature of virtual font to fallback Japanese font definition.

dvips (full dvips news)

• Default PostScript document title is now the basename of the input file, and can be overridden with the new option -title.
• If an .eps or other image file is not found, exit with bad status.
• Support new feature of virtual font to fallback Japanese font definition.

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)

• keep only one backup of the main repository's texlive.tlpdb.
• even more portability across systems and Perl versions.
• tlmgr info reports new lcat-* and rcat-* fields for local vs. remote Catalogue data.
• full logging of subcommands moved to new log file texmf-var/web2c/tlmgr-commands.log.

MacTeX

MacTeX and its new binary folder universal-darwin now require macOS 10.14 or higher (Mojave, Catalina, and Big Sur); the x86_64-darwin binary folder is no longer present. The x86_64-darwinlegacy binary folder, available only with the Unix install-tl, supports 10.6 and newer.

This is an important year for the Macintosh because Apple introduced ARM machines in November and will sell and support both ARM and Intel machines for many years. All programs in universal-darwin have executable code for both ARM and Intel. Both binaries are compiled from the same source code.

The additional programs Ghostscript, LaTeXiT, TeX Live Utility, and TeXShop are all universal and are signed with a hardened runtime, so all are included in MacTeX this year.