LaTeX2e got an update
Today an update of LaTeX2e has been released on CTAN. The previous update dates back to June 27, 2011. LaTeX2e has been stable for a long time, there are mainly maintenance work and bug fixes.
- The package fixltx2e got an update: loading the package fixes bugs and improves bad design decisions of previous versions of LaTeX. Such corrections were put into an extra package for backwards compatibility. From this version on, placement arguments for floats will be checked and in case of errors, such as a wrong v in \begin{figure}[tv], an error message will be raised. Furthermore the behavior in case of mixing one- and twocolumn floats has been improved, to fix that it was possible that placement got out of sync.
- There’s a new package with the name fltrace: the original internal LaTeX code for placing floats has been extracted and information output has been added, which can be switched off and on, to analyze and to understand how LaTeX works when placing the floats. \usepackage{fltrace}\tracefloats activates it.
- The inputenc package has been improved: there were problems with the Unicode based engines XeTeX and LuaTeX, now it’s compatible with option utf8or ascii, it runs and just issues a warning. Other options, i.e. really incompatible input encodings, cause the compiler to stop with an error message.
- .ins files, used to extract code files from source files, are now provided for single files instead of complete subfolders, making updates easier.
- The multicol package got corrections and an extension: code can be run dependent on in which column we currently are.
- tabularx relaxes restrictions for using \tabularx and \endtabularx in the definition of new environments.
- showkeys got bug fixes for using at the beginning of list items and with grouping by curly braces within the optional argument of \cite.
- The color package now provides the command \nopagecolor.
- In graphicx the command \rotatebox now accepts arguments containing paragraph breaks done by \par or an empty line.
- Also keyval now can deal with \par and empty lines in values.
The updated documentation files of the mentioned packages provide detailed information, furthermore you can read about the updates in the LaTeX-News, issue 21.
Such updates are in sync with version changes of TeX Live. Version 2013 is currently frozen, that’s why you can get the update just with the pretest version 2014 via CTAN or from ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/base, until TeX Live 2014 has been released.
LaTeX2e can already use features planned for LaTeX3 with the expl3 package. Also there will be news soon.
