After development and many weeks of testing, final bug fixing and translations the new TeX Live 2009 has been released today.

Some changes and improvements in 2009:

• pdf(La)TeX now automatically converts included eps files to pdf, using the epstopdf package, if graphics.cfg is loaded and pdf output is chosen.
• The execution of certain external commands, for example epstopdf, makeindex, and bibtex, using \write18, is now enabled by default. The texmf.cnf file determines those commands.
• Updated AMS Type 1 fonts are included, the Euler fonts have been reshaped.
• The new editor TeXworks is included for Windows and MacTeX. Other distributions like Ubuntu and Debian Linux will provide this cross-platform editor with their own packaging system.
• Asymptote is included for several platforms.
• dvipdfm has been replaced by dvipdfmx.
• pdf is now the default output format for Lua(La)TeX. dvi output can be achieved by using the new executables dviluatex and dvilualatex.

In my opinion it’s a big step forward because several Linux Distributions like Ubuntu and Debian Linux are clinging to TL 2007 until now. While TL 2008 has been skipped the packaging for TL 2009 for Debian and Ubuntu is in progress, thanks to the work of especially Norbert Preining and Frank Küster. Though v2008 and v2009 worked fine on Linux it’s important to provide TeX with the distribution repositories, less workarounds will be necessary.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Karl Berry announced on the TeX Live mailing list today that the new version 2009/09/24 of LaTeX2e has been released by the LaTeX Project team. The changed have been incorporated into TeX Live and will be available with the pretest version of TeX Live 2009.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

The version 2.8 of the Windows LaTeX Distribution MiKTeX has been released on September 1, 2009. Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, Server 2003 and 2008 are supported. It’s coming with a portable edition that makes it possible to run MiKTeX for instance from USB sticks. MiKTeX now includes the integrated development environment TeXworks.

For more information visit

• the MiKTeX homepage,
• the 2.8 status page,
• the release notes,
• the download/setup area.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

A test version of TeX Live 2009 has been released. The developer team writes: “We greatly appreciate any testing of TeX Live before the official release. The more people who do so, the better the final release will be. It is also a chance to influence the eventual result. Testers should try it 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”.”

Visit http://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html for download and information concerning installation, testing and reporting.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Yesterday Christian Schenk has released the portable edition of MiKTeX 2.8 beta3. This edition allows to use MiKTeX on portable storage devices like USB sticks or flash cards for use on any Windows (2000/XP/Vista/7) computer. Using Portable MiKTeX leaves no traces on the host computer, no administrator privileges would be needed. Visit miktex.org/portable for more information and download.

Though the installation of TeX Live 2008 could be done easily also on Ubuntu Linux the installation of the very recommendable LaTeX editor Kile could raise a problem because Kile depends on the package texlive-latex-base of Ubuntu/ Debian Linux. There’s a tool called equivs helping to circumvent such dependencies by creating dummy packages, see APT HOWTO, Very useful helpers.

equivs can be installed by Synaptic or by aptitude or apt-get from the repositories:
sudo apt-get install equivs
equivs is able to create Debian packages providing information to the local package management. I’ve created a control file (calles texlive.ctl) for equivs simulating just texlive-latex-base:

Section: tex
Package: texlive-dummy
Provides: texlive-latex-base
Description: texlive dummy package
 This package provides dpkg with the information that
 there is the package texlive-latex-base installed.

I’ve processed it with equivs-build:
equivs-build texlive.ctl
The program created a file texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb. This could be installed by
sudo dpkg -i texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb
Afterwards Kile could be installed without to request any texlive package from the repositories and Kile worked fine with TeX Live 2008. (Update: see comment #4 for a complete control file for Kile on Jaunty.) You could lock the package to prevent it from being installed later.

The control file may refer to a different section (like misc) or could contain additional information (Provides: texlive-base, texlive-base-bin, …)

TeX Live 2008 is not planned any more to be released for Debian and therefore not for Ubuntu Linux. That version will be skipped, as announced by a Debian TeX maintainer, and TeX Live 2009, meant to be the next release for Debian/Ubuntu, is still under construction, that’s why I’m taking this as a temporary solution. After all the 2008 version is working fine thanks to the great work of the TeX Live team.

Christian Schenk announced on April 2nd that he’s planning to release a portable MiKTeX edition later this year. The portable edition will allow you to run MiKTeX from a flash drive:

• you could carry MiKTeX on a portable drive for use on any Windows computer,
• configuration settings will be stored on the portable drive and not on the host computer,
• using the portable edition won’t leave traces on the host computer,
• administrator privileges on the host computer won’t be necessary.

Christian said that a beta will be released soon, on April 6th he has noted that also the package manager will be available with the portable edition and that packages will be on installed on the flash drive.

I’m frequently noticing questions regarding problems with paper size and pdfLaTeX, for instance Bug 215561 and Bug 244043 on Launchpad, yesterday on mrunix.de and also yesterday on matheplanet.com.
If you manually change \paperwidth or \paperheight or use the landscape option of LaTeX classes like for instance article it could happen that the paper size of the resulting pdf differs.
A solution is to adjust the \pdfpagewidth and \pdfpageheight values:

\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{\paperwidth}
\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{\paperheight}

To use the geometry package could correct it too. But if you use it together with gmeometric, it may still be necessary to adjust the pdf page size like written above, see for instance goLaTeX.de.

TeX Live 2008 is now officially released. This information was posted by Karl Berry to comp.text.tex yesterday, though it’s been available for download since some days already. In this version the underlying package infrastructure has been redesigned and reimplemented, it allows dynamic package updates over the internet like with MiKTeX for years. That’s a big step forward!
You can find more information about new and changed features by reading the original release notes.

See also:

• Homepage of TeX Live
• TeX Live availability for download and dvd ordering
• Donating to TUG Activities
• Contributing to TeX Live as user, author or developer

When I tried to help somebody to solve a problem in the LaTeX Community Forum, I wrote a short test file, but it was not compilable though it contained just basic commands. I reduced it to the following minimal example:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{listings}
\begin{document}
\lstlistoflistings
\end{document}

It was not compilable with TeXlive 2007 on Ubuntu Linux 8.04, the error message was:
! Undefined control sequence.
\lstlistoflistings ...\lol@heading \@parskipfalse
    \@parskip@indent \@startto...
l.5 \lstlistoflistings

After examining listings.sty it seemed to be just a compatibility issue: the listings version 1.3 of 2004/09/07 distributed with the texlive-latex-recommended package of Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (hardy) just doesn’t work with the scrartcl class of KOMA-Script v2.95b (2006/07/30) that comes with TeXlive 2007-13.

For instance scrartcl.cls v2.8 used \@parskip internally together with the parskip/halfparskip/parindent options, but that’s been changed.

After installation of version 1.4 of the listings package by the MiKTeX package manager the compilation was successful.

The line

\@parskipfalse\@parskip@indent%

of listings v1.3 had been changed in v.1.4 to

\parskip\z@\parindent\z@\parfillskip \z@ \@plus 1fil%

I’ve sent a bugreport by launchpad expecting that the new version of listings.sty will be distributed with the texlive package soon.