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 the best opportunity 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 the equivalent in your browser) 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:

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.

Installing

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

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 finding the 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:

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


$Date: 2013/05/11 23:27:37 $; TeX Live;