Pretesting TeX Live

The entire TeX Live community greatly benefits from all testing of TeX Live before the official release. The more people who test in advance, the better the final release can be. It is also the best opportunity to influence and improve the behavior of TL.

So please try it if you like. As distributed, the pretest will not interfere with any existing installations of TeX.

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

Downloading

You can retrieve the pretest files from one of these hosts: copy-paste an http or ftp url when running the installer directly, or use an rsync url for mirroring, as described below. (Our thanks to 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 reiterate: you must use install-tl from the pretest; trying to work with a TL installation from previous years will fail completely.)

• To mirror the whole directory, rsync is the most efficient method:
  rsync -a --delete --exclude="mactex*" somemirror::/some/path/ /your/local/dir
  Add -v if you want to see the names of the files as they are transferred.
  Add -L if your system does not support symbolic links.
  Full rsync documentation.

  After mirroring the directory, run the install-tl script, below.

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

  On the other hand, if you are only interested in MacTeX, you can mirror/download only the full mactex-*.pkg file (several gb) or mactex-basictex-*.pkg (100+mb), as in, for the full MacTeX:
  rsync -a --delete --include="mactex-2*" --exclude="*" somemirror::/some/path/ /your/local/dir

64-bit Windows binaries are not included in TL this year. You can get them as either the natively-compiled binaries from Akira Kakuto (has its own instructions), or the mingw-compiled binaries from Luigi Scarso plus his auxiliary programs (install as a custom binary set).

The pretest build runs nightly, ending by 4am Paris time unless something goes wrong. The mirror hosts should all be up to date within a few hours after that.

Installing

After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl-windows.bat (Windows) to perform the installation. We just use install-tl as the command name in these examples:

• install-tl -repository location -gui text
  for text (command line) mode; this is the default on normal Unix, but not on Windows or Macs.
• install-tl -repository location -gui
  is the default on Windows and Macs. It runs a Tcl/Tk-based GUI if Tcl/Tk is available, simple at startup but with a button to invoke the advanced interface. If Tcl/Tk is not available, tries the Perl/Tk GUI; if that's not available either, falls back to text mode. TeX Live includes a Tcl/Tk runtime for Windows, and Tcl/Tk is a standard part of current Mac systems.

  The previous -gui wizard, -gui perltk and -gui wizard options are still available if Perl/Tk is installed, but Perl/Tk has been removed from TL's own Perl distribution for Windows.

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 the location urls). The location must be an ftp or http url (not rsync).

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 and pdflatex sample2e. If that works, even more useful is to try your real-life documents, to check that they still work as expected. If third-party packages have changed incompatibly, their maintainers should be contacted directly.

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

Notable changes

The main TeX Live documentation and translations are not yet fully updated.

As always, there are pervasive updates to packages and programs. We can't list them all, but here are the major user-visible changes in the principal programs:

kpathsea (full Kpathsea news)

More consistent brace expansion and path splitting (details in the Kpathsea manual); new variable TEXMFDOTDIR instead of hardwired . in paths allows for easily searching additional or sub-directories (comments in texmf.cnf).

eptex, euptex

New primitives \readpapersizespecial and \expanded.

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

• Lua 5.3 now used, with concomitant arithmetic and interface changes.
• The homegrown library pplib is used to read pdf files, thus eliminating the dependency on poppler (and the need for C++); Lua interface changed accordingly.

metapost (full MetaPost news)

• r-mpost command name recognized as an alias for invocation with the --restricted option, and added to the list of restricted commands available by default.
• Minimum precision now 2 for decimal and binary mode.
• Binary mode no longer available in MPlib but still available in standalone MetaPost.

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

New primitive \expanded; if new primitive parameter \pdfomitcharset is set to 1, the /CharSet string omitted from the PDF output, since it cannot feasibly be guaranteed correct, as required by PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3.

xetex (full XeTeX news)

New primitives \expanded, \creationdate, \elapsedtime, \filedump, \filemoddate, \filesize, \resettimer, \normaldeviate, \uniformdeviate, \randomseed; extend \Ucharcat to produce active characters. More in the XeTeX manual.

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)

Support curl as a download program; use lz4 and gzip before xz for backups, if available; prefer system-provided binaries over TL-provided binaries for compressor and download programs, unless the environment variable TEXLIVE_PREFER_OWN is set.

install-tl

New option -gui (with no argument) is the default on Windows and Macs, and invokes a new Tcl/TK GUI, as described above.

MacTeX

x86_64-darwin now supports 10.12 and higher (Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave); x86_64-darwinlegacy supports 10.6 and newer. The spell checker Excalibur is no longer included, since it requires 32-bit support.

Utilities

• cwebbin is now the CWEB implementation in TeX Live, with support for more language dialects, and including the ctwill program to make mini-indexes.
• chkdvifont: report font information from DVI files, also from tfm/ofm, vf, gf, pk.
• dvispc: make a DVI file page-independent wrt specials.

Platforms

Removed sparc-solaris.

If you discover other changes that should be noted, please report them. Such documentation improvements are among the most important things pretesters can help with.