Testing TeX Live before release

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 good chance to influence and improve the behavior of TL.

Please try 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”.

On this page: downloading - installing - testing - updating - reporting - news.

Downloading

You can retrieve the pretest files from one of these hosts: right-click on the chosen host and use “copy link location” or your browser's equivalent to get a specific url to paste. (Our thanks to all these sites for making their space and bandwidth available.)

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 mirror the whole directory, rsync is the most efficient method:
  rsync -a --delete --exclude="mactex*" rsync://somemirror/some/path/ /your/local/dir
  After mirroring the directory, run the install-tl script, as below.

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

  Alternatively, if you are only interested in MacTeX, you might choose just to mirror/download that one mactex* file, which is self-contained.

The pretest build runs nightly, ending around 5am Denmark time (+0200 UTC) unless something goes wrong. The mirror hosts should all be up to date within a couple of hours after that.

Additional binary sets for OpenIndiana and Solaris 11, thanks to Apostolos Syropoulos: i386-solaris11 and x86_64-solaris11. (See the custom binary page for more.)

Installing

After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl.bat (Windows) to perform the installation:

• install-tl -repository location -gui text for text (command line) mode; this is the default on Unix.
• install-tl -repository location -gui wizard for a maximally simplified GUI installation asking only the minimal questions; this is the default on Windows.
• install-tl -repository location -gui perltk for advanced/expert GUI installation with the usual array of options; requires Perl/Tk (shipped with TL on Windows, must be installed independently on Unix).

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 how to get a value for location).

But in the case of installing from your own mirrored repository, you should omit -repository location from the given command lines.

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. If that works, even more useful is to try your real-life documents, to make sure they still work as expected.

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. Bugs about specific packages should be reported to the package maintainers; TeX Live's job is to install (some of) what is available on CTAN, not make changes on top of it. Resources for general questions and help using TeX are available separately.

Notable changes

The main TeX Live documentation and translations are not yet fully updated. Here is a terse list of major user-visible changes:

• tlmgr: supports updates from multiple network repositories. The section on multiple repositories in tlmgr --help has more.
• xetex: \XeTeXdashbreakstate=1 by default, for both xetex and xelatex. This allows line breaks after em-dashes and en-dashes, which has always been the behavior of plain TeX, LaTeX, LuaTeX, etc. Existing XeTeX documents which must retain perfect line-break compatibility will need to set \XeTeXdashbreakstate=0 explicitly.
• pdftex, dvips: output files can exceed 2gb.
• dvips: the 35 standard PostScript fonts are included in the output by default, since so many different versions of them are extant.
• kpathsea: mpost is allowed as a \write18 command in restricted execution mode (the default).
• kpathsea: texmf.cnf is now also found in ../texmf-local, e.g., /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c/texmf.cnf, if it exists.
• updmap: reads a per-tree updmap.cfg instead of one global one; invisible unless you edited your updmap.cfg's directly. (Run updmap --help for more.) Consequence: users with fonts installed in a personal tree should not run tlmgr generate updmap; just updmap suffices.
• Platforms: armel-linux and mipsel-linux added; mips-irix, sparc-linux, and i386-netbsd are no longer in the main distribution, but will be available for installation as custom binaries, along with a variety of other platforms.

If you discover other important changes we should note, please let us know.