Pretesting TeX Live 2022

The entire TeX Live community greatly benefits from all testing before the official release. The more people who test in advance, the better the final release can be. It is also the best opportunity to influence and improve the behavior of TL. Please give it a try if you can.

As distributed, the pretest will not interfere with any existing installations of TeX, either native TeX Live or operating system distributions.

On this page: downloading - installing - testing - updating - reporting - migrating - 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. And more mirrors are welcome.

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="*.pkg*" somemirror::/some/path/ /your/local/dir
  Add -v if you want to see the names of the files as they are transferred.
  Add -L if your system does not support symbolic links.
  Full rsync documentation.

  After mirroring the directory, run the install-tl script, below.

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

  On the other hand, if you are only interested in MacTeX, you can mirror/download only the full mactex-*.pkg file (several gb) or mactex-basictex-*.pkg (100+mb), as in, for the full MacTeX:
  rsync -a --delete --include="mactex-2*" --exclude="*" somemirror::/some/path/ /your/local/dir

For regular installations via download (i.e., not mirroring), we highly recommend installing the LWP Perl package if you don't have it.

64-bit Windows binaries are not included in TL. You can get them as either the natively-compiled binaries from Akira Kakuto (has its own instructions), or the mingw-compiled binaries from Luigi Scarso plus his auxiliary programs (install as a custom binary set).

The pretest build runs nightly, ending by 04:00 Copenhagen time unless something goes wrong. The mirror hosts should all be up to date within a few hours after that. (Current time in Denmark: .)

Installing

After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl-windows.bat (Windows) to perform the installation. We just use install-tl as the command name in these examples:

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 the location urls). 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.

• install-tl -repository location -gui text
  for text (command line) mode; this is the default on normal Unix, but not on Windows or Macs.

• install-tl -repository location -gui
  is the default on Windows and Macs. It runs a Tcl/Tk-based GUI if Tcl/Tk is available, simple at startup but with a button to invoke the advanced interface. If Tcl/Tk is not available, falls back to text mode. TeX Live includes a Tcl/Tk runtime for Windows.

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 and pdflatex sample2e. If that works, even more useful is to try your real-life documents, to check that they still work as expected. If third-party packages have changed incompatibly, their maintainers should be contacted directly.

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 basic 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.

Migrating from the pretest to the release

The last pretest build is usually close to the official release. If you are using the standard directory setup, you can rename your pretest installation (say, /usr/local/texlive/pretest) to the per-year directory (/usr/local/texlive/2022) and change your search path. The other change you will likely have to make is to take updates from CTAN again: tlmgr option repo ctan.

Then, after the release is made, a normal update (tlmgr update --self --all) should sync with whatever changes were made after the last pretest. The result should be equivalent to doing a full installation.

Notable changes

The main TeX Live documentation and translations are not yet fully updated.

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

General

• New engine hitex, which outputs its own HINT format, designed especially for reading technical documents on mobile devices. HINT viewers for GNU/Linux, Windows, and Android are also available.
• tangle, weave: support optional third argument to specify output file.
• Knuth's program twill for making mini-indexes for original WEB programs now included.

Cross-engine extensions

In engines except for original TeX, Aleph, and hiTeX:

• New primitive \showstream to redirect \show output to a file.
• New primitives \partokenname and \partokencontext allow overriding the name of the \par token emitted at blank lines, the end of vboxes, etc.

eptex, euptex (full ChangeLog)

• New primitives: \lastnodefont, \suppresslongerror, \suppressoutererror, \suppressmathparerror.
• pdfTeX extension \vadjust pre now available.

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

• Support structured destinations from PDF 2.0.
• PNG /Smask for PDF 2.0.
• Variable font interface for luahbtex.
• Different radical style defaults in mathdefaultsmode.
• Optionally block selected discretionary creation.
• Improvements for TrueType fonts implementation.
• More efficient \fontdimen allocation.
• Ignore paragraphs with only a local par node followed by direction synchronization nodes.

metapost (full MetaPost news)

Bug fix for infinite macro expansion.

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

• Support structured destinations from PDF 2.0.
• For letterspaced fonts, use explicit \fontdimen6 if specified.
• Always start a warning at the beginning of a line.
• for characters with autokern (\pdfappendkern and \pdfprependkern), still do protrusion; likewise, autokern both implicit and explicit hyphens.

ptex et al. (full pTeX news)

• Major update of pTeX to 4.0.0 to better support current LaTeX.
• New primitives \ptexlineendmode and \toucs.
• \ucs (formerly available in uptex, euptex) becomes available also in ptex, eptex.
• Distinguish 8-bit characters and Japanese characters as discussed in a TUGboat 41:3 article by Hironori Kitagawa.
• Related changes in related engines: eptex, uptex & euptex.

xetex (full XeTeX news)

New wrapper scripts xetex-unsafe and xelatex-unsafe for simpler invocation of documents requiring both XeTeX and PSTricks transparency operators, which is inherently unsafe (until and unless reimplementation in Ghostscript happens). For safety, use Lua(La)TeX.

dvipdfmx (full dvipdfmx news)

• Support for PSTricks without requiring -dNOSAFER, except for transparency.
• The -r option to set bitmap font resolution works again.

dvips (full dvips news)

By default, do not attempt automatic media adjustment for rotated paper sizes; the new option --landscaperotate re-enables.

upmendex (full upmendex news)

• This index-sorting program is mostly upward-compatible with makeindex, with much better (Unicode-based) multilingual support. It's been in TL for some years.
• Experimental support for Arabic and Hebrew scripts; improved character classification and language support.

kpathsea (full Kpathsea news)

First path returned from kpsewhich -all is now the same as a regular (non-all) search.

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)

• use https for mirror.ctan.org by default.
• use TEXMFROOT instead of SELFAUTOPARENT for easier relocating.

MacTeX

MacTeX and its binary folder universal-darwin require macOS 10.14 or higher (Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey). The x86_64-darwinlegacy binary folder, available only with the Unix install-tl, supports 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and newer.

Platforms

No changes to platform support for this year (2022). However, for next year's release (2023), we are planning to switch the Windows binaries from 32-bit to 64-bit. Unfortunately we cannot feasibly support both simultaneously.

If you discover other changes that should be noted, please report them. Such documentation improvements are among the most important things pretesters can help with.