The beta version of MiKTeX 2.9 has been released. Windows 7, Vista, XP (at least SP 3), Server 2003 and 2008 (at least SP 2) are supported, Windows 2000 no longer.
LuaTeX has been integrated for the first time and several software packages have been updated.

The final version of MiKTeX 2.9 will be released in October.

For more information visit

• the MiKTeX homepage,
• the 2.9 status page,
• the release notes,
• the blog announcement,
• the download/setup area.

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

Issue 4 of the LaTeX3 news has been published today.

The version 2.0 of the free LaTeX editor Texmaker has been released today. The most notable changes:

• a built-in pdf viewer has been added providing auto-refresh after a compilation,
• there’s a new option to the quick build command causing that Texmaker doesn’t launch a new instance of the dvi/ps/pdf viewer if the file is already opened,
• the tabular assistant is now complete,
• a new document can be directly created by copying an existing one,
• there’s a new wizard to set the “user quick build command”,
• the amsmath align tag has been added to the Math menu.

SyncTeX is not used.

The complete changelog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

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

Christian Schenk announced today that the support for MiKTeX 2.6 and MiKTeX 2.7 will end at the end of this year. MiKTeX 2.6/2.7 will be removed from CTAN on January 1st, 2011.

So, the last possible date for updating MiKTeX 2.6/2.7 over the internet is December 31st. Users of those versions are encouraged to switch to MiKTeX 2.9 expected to be released in October 2010.

German version | auf Deutsch

Christian Schenk has published the roadmap for MiKTeX 2.9. According to his blog the beta version of 2.9 shall appear in August and the general release of 2.9 is expected in October 2010. The new version will contain updates of pdfTeX, XeTeX, BibteX and of the editor TeXworks. LuaTeX will be introduced.

MiKTeX is a very popular LaTeX distribution running on Windows systems.

German version | auf Deutsch

The version 1.6.7 of LyX has been released. This maintenance release is the first to be supposed to run smoothly with Qt 4.6, that’s why the LyX developers encourage all users and distributors using Qt 4.6 to upgrade to this version.

For more information and download visit:

• the LyX Homepage,
• the announcement containing a list of changes and fixes,
• the download area.

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

CTAN users might encounter problems today. Today Robin Fairbairns informed on the ctan-ann mailing list that there’s been an incident on the cambridge node that affected other sites as well. Restoring is in progress (thanks to Robin Fairbairns) but it may take some time.

Update: the problem has been solved.

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I’ve read in a post by Jürgen to TeX-D-L tonight: at the TUG 2010 Donald E. Knuth announced the successor to TeX: iTeX. Read more on slashdot and science.slashdot.org. Don’t take it too seriously.

Update: the recording of the “earthshaking announcement” can now be seen on River Valley TV.

The version 4.0 of the Foxit Reader has been released. It’s a light-weight and fast reader for PDF documents and it can be downloaded for free. Version 4 provides new features:

• reviewing and commenting tools like highlighting, underlining, striking out, search and replace, magnifying glass and inserting notes,
• editing tools like textbox, adding comments, measuring bar and form filling,
• spell checker for comments,
• undo and redo for comments,
• adding multimedia like images, movies, file attachments and links to a PDF document,
• conversion of PDF to text format,
• modifying bookmarks,
• safe mode for secure reading.

The reader comes with the ask.com toolbar, it’s installed by default so be careful if you don’t like that! In this case choose the custom installation and click the Decline button - otherwise the toolbar will be installed even if you unmark the check boxes. Even if that happened, the Foxit Toolbar can be uninstalled in the Control Panel of Windows.

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

Today Markus Kohm announced on golatex.de that KOMA-Script 3.06 has been released. Beside bug fixes it brings some new features, see 3.06 release notes. You can download the new version on BerliOS.

German version | auf Deutsch