TeX Live 2023 - bugs and updates

Most of TeX Live is a redistribution of packages and programs from elsewhere, primarily CTAN. So, the place to send bug reports varies:

Common requests:

Known issues in TeX Live 2023

The four LuaTeX binaries (luatex luahbtex luajitex luajithbtex) were rebuilt in early May, 2023; the fixed version is 1.17.0. All installations should upgrade. Current TL has binaries for the new version on all supported platforms. Updated x86_64-linux binaries are available for all TL releases since 2017 in the historic archive (subdirectory systems/texlive/YYYY/patches/); 32-bit Windows binaries are also available, built from the TL23 sources (though TL23 itself does not include any 32-bit Windows binaries). More info.

The change that's most likely to be noticeable is that the socket library is now disabled by default; a new command line option --socket enables it, as well as --shell-escape (not --shell-restricted). In addition, the mime library is now always available, and new functions os.socketsleep and os.socketgettime are also always available. Finally, some obscure ways to work around various security features were fixed.

Notable changes

As always, there were pervasive updates to packages and programs (highlights of changes). We can't list them all, but here are some of the principal user-visible changes:

Windows
As announced previously, TeX Live now contains 64-bit Windows binaries instead of 32-bit. The new directory name is bin/windows (it did not seem right to put 64-bit binaries into a directory named with “32”). We know this will cause extra work for Windows users, but there seemed no better alternative. See the separate TeX Live Windows page for more.

ConTeXt
At the request of the ConTeXt maintainers, TeX Live now includes ConTeXt LMTX (known by several names), based on the new LuaMetaTeX engine by Hans Hagen. The previous pdfTeX-based version is no longer included, and there are only three executables: luametatex (the binary), context and mtxrun (both symlinks to luametatex). (Preprint of forthcoming TUGboat article about this.)

Binaries are provided for most platforms, but not as many as before. LuaMetaTeX is not built as part of TL, since it uses an entirely different build system (cmake instead of automake); so, anyone who wants it on a platform not provided needs to build it from the LuaMetaTeX source (snapshot included in TL in the source/ tree).

Cross-engine extensions
In engines except for original TeX and e-TeX:

euptex (full ChangeLog)

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

metapost (full MetaPost news)
Bug fixes: svg->dx and svg->dy are now double, for better precision; mp_begin_iteration updated; memory leak in mplib fixed.

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

ptex et al. (full pTeX news)

xetex (full XeTeX news)
bug fix for \topskip and \splittopskip computation when \XeTeXupwardsmode is active; the cross-engine “late \special” described above.

bibtexu (full bibtexu news)

dvipdfmx (full dvipdfmx news)

kpathsea (full Kpathsea news)
Support guessing input file encodings for Unix-ish platforms, as on Windows; enabled for (e)p(la)tex, pbibtex, mendex.

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)

MacTeX

Platforms

Bug archives for the previous release and earlier years remain online (under systems/texlive; both the initial release each year, and the frozen state at the end of the cycle in tlnet-final).

If you discover other changes that should be noted, please send them in.


$Date: 2023/05/20 22:46:50 $; TeX Live; [an error occurred while processing this directive]