Today, TeX Live 2012 has been released. TeX Live is a comprehensive TeX and LaTeX system for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix systems. A special version called MacTeX 2012 is available for Mac OS X.

Changes compared to TeX Live 2011:

• tlmgr supports updates from multiple network repositories.
• The parameter \XeTeXdashbreakstate is set to 1 by default. This allows line breaks after em-dashes and en-dashes, which has always been the behavior of other engines and formats such as plain TeX, LaTeX, and LuaTeX. Explicitly set \XeTeXdashbreakstate to 0 for perfect line-break compatibility for existing XeTeX documents.
• The output files generated by pdftex and dvips, among others, can now exceed 2gb.
• The 35 standard PostScript fonts are included in the output of dvips by default.
• In the restricted \write18 execution mode, set by default, mpost is now an allowed program.
• A texmf.cnf file is also found in ../texmf-local, e.g., /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c/texmf.cnf, if it exists.
• The updmap script reads a per-tree updmap.cfg instead of one global config.
• Platforms: armel-linux and mipsel-linux added; sparc-linux and i386-netbsd are no longer in the main distribution, but are available for installation as custom binaries, along with a variety of other platforms.

For more information and download visit

• the Homepage of TeX Live
• the list of changes
• the TeX Live download page
• Donating to TUG Activities
• Contributing to TeX Live as user, author or developer.

Today Karl Berry announced on the TeX Live mailing list, that in about one week (May 10) TeX Live 2011 and tlnet will be frozen, and the building of the pretest version of TeX Live 2012 will start shortly after that.

So the schedule for the release of TeX 2012 is, as it can be read on the TeX Live homepage:

• May 10: TeX Live 2011 and tlnet frozen
• About 2 weeks: CTAN updates continue, pretesting starts
• May 24: Also CTAN updates stop, updates only on request
• May 31: Complete freeze, some time for testing and documentation
• June 14: Final images for the TeX Collection DVD
• In August: DVDs will be delivered to TUG members.

This is the plan, changes are still possible as it depends on the time of the developers and contributors.

TeX Live 2011 is now available online. It is a comprehensive TeX system working on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix systems. It includes LaTeX and all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software and supports many languages. TeX Live has been developed since 1996 supported by several TeX user groups.

There are some changes in the new version:

• biber is now included, a program for bibliography processing.
• The Mac OS X binaries now work only on Leopard or later; Panther and Tiger are no longer supported.
• MetaPost no longer creates or uses .mem files. Needed files are read on every run.
• updmap runs much faster now.

Also MacTeX 2011 has been published online.

For more information and download visit

• the Homepage of TeX Live
• the list of changes
• the TeX Live download page
• Donating to TUG Activities
• Contributing to TeX Live as user, author or developer.

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

Today Karl Berry announced that a pretest version of TeX Live 2011 is now available. It can be downloaded from several repositories. The documentation has not been fully updated yet. The TeX Live Team would like it if you send them test reports and suggestions.

Some changes in 2011:

• The Mac OS X binaries now work only on Leopard or later; Panther and Tiger are no longer supported.
• MetaPost no longer creates or uses .mem files. Needed files are read on every run.
• updmap runs much faster now.

Fore more information and download visit the TeX Live testing page.

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

TeX Live 2010 is available now.

Some changes in 2010, like announced in this blog post:

• pdfLaTeX automatically converts EPS files for inclusion, as already been planned but dismissed for the previous release
• The execution of a some external commands from TeX, via \write18, is now enabled by default.
• The default PDF version for the output is now 1.5 allowing a better compression.
• Some programs have been added: pTeX for Japanese typesetting, chktex, the dvisvgm converter, further BibTeXU for Unicode support in BibTeX.
• XeTeX now uses microtype for margin kerning but doesn’t support font expansion yet.

For more information and download visit

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

Today Karl Berry announced that a pretest version of TeX Live 2010 is available now. It can be downloaded from certain repositories. The documentation has not yet been updated. The same may still apply to versions for some Unix platforms. But it’s in progress; by now you can obtain an early version of TL 2010 for testing. The TeX Live Team would be happy if you send them test reports and suggestions.

Some changes in 2010:

• When using pdfLaTeX EPS files can be automatically converted and included.
• The default PDF version for the output is now 1.5 allowing a better compression.
• Some new programs have been included: pTeX for Japanese typesetting, chktex, the dvisvgm converter, futher BibTeXU for Unicode support in BibTeX.

Fore more information and download visit the TeX Live testing page.

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

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.

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.

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.