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:

• 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*" 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.

  On the other hand, 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.

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 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:

• Distribution layout: the top-level texmf/ directory has been merged into texmf-dist/, for simplicity. Both the TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFDIST Kpathsea variables now point to texmf-dist.
• Language collections merged, to simplify installation and updates.
• metapost: native support for PNG output and floating-point (IEEE double) has been added.
• luatex: updated to Lua 5.2, and includes a new library (pdfscanner) to process external PDF page content. Full LuaTeX NEWS.
• xetex (full XeTeX NEWS):
  • The HarfBuzz library now used for font layout instead of ICU. (ICU is still used to support input encodings, bidirectionality, and the optional Unicode line breaking.)
  • Graphite2 and HarfBuzz are used instead of SilGraphite for Graphite layout.
  • On Macs, Core Text is used instead of the (deprecated) ATSUI.
  • Prefer TrueType/OpenType fonts to Type1 when the names are the same.
  • Fix occasional mismatch in font finding between xetex and xdvipdfmx.
  • Support OpenType math cut-ins.
• xdvi: now uses freetype instead of t1lib for rendering.
• microtype.sty: some support for xetex (protrusion) and luatex (protrusion, font expansion, tracking), among other enhancements.
• tlmgr: new pinning action to ease configuring multiple repositories; that section in tlmgr --help has more.
• Platforms: armhf-linux, mips-irix, i386-netbsd, amd64-netbsd added or revived; powerpc-aix removed. Support for some additional platforms is available as custom binaries.
• Some platforms are omitted from the DVD (purely to save space), but can be installed normally over the net.

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