TeX Live 2009 - bugs and updates

Most of TeX Live is a redistribution of packages and programs from elsewhere, primarily CTAN. If you have problems with a TeX document, e.g., a package is no longer behaving as it used to, these issues need to be reported to the package maintainer. If you have questions about using TeX, or need help on a particular point, please use the general help resources.

For TeX Live infrastructure bug reports or other comments, please email the tex-live mailing list.

Known issues in TeX Live 2009:

• We added a short section to the English documentation about security considerations, which boil down to the need for care when processing untrusted documents, especially on Windows (where programs found in the current directory are preferred—so watch out for programs and scripts in the current directory). There was not an opportunity to add that to the translations for the current release.
• We had expected to enable by default a new “restricted” \write18 feature allowing execution of only certain commands, in particular for an automated eps-to-pdf conversion when running pdflatex. (There are still some traces of this in the documentation.) Unfortunately, we found several nontrivial problems in the implementation late in the process, and it did not seem wise to attempt hasty fixes. So \write18 is disabled by default, and must be enabled explicitly via the command line or in texmf.cnf, as in all past releases.
• If you try to make the format for ConTeXt with the LuaTeX engine, it will fail: their respective versions in TeX Live 2009 are unfortunately incompatible. If you want to keep up with ConTeXt development, we recommend the context-minimals, rather than working with the version in TeX Live.
• oolatex and various other less-used tex4ht scripts were removed from the binary directories, to avoid clashes. We failed to document this. Use mk4ht oolatex, et al.
• Not new in this release, but we have rediscovered that the omega font utilities, such as ovp2ovf, are in an inconsistent and rather flawed state.
• tlmgrgui appears not to work properly with the SCIM daemon running; for instance, input text boxes might not be writable. Use IBUS instead, or try XIM_PROGRAM=scim; XIM_ARGS=-d. (If the gui is working fine for you, just ignore this.)
• On *BSD systems, by default perl-Tk is compiled without XFT support, and the result can have font problems in tlmgrgui. On FreeBSD, you need to pass WITH_XFT to the port, for example:

  # cd /usr/ports/x11-toolkits/p5-Tk
  # make -DWITH_XFT install clean
  

• FreeBSD (both i386-freebsd and amd64-freebsd) binaries were not available in time for the DVD release, but they are available now, for FreeBSD versions 5, 6, 7, and 8. You can install them as custom binaries. Adventurous FreeBSD users may like to download binaries built from the current sources. (Thanks to Nikola Lečić.)

Newsworthy changes in this release.

Bug archives for the previous release and earlier years are still online.