TeX Live 2013 - bugs and updates

Most of TeX Live is a redistribution of packages and programs from elsewhere, primarily CTAN. So, the target for bug reports varies according to the nature of the problem.

• If you have problems with a TeX document, e.g., a package is no longer behaving as it used to, this needs to be reported to the package maintainer. As a rule, package-specific fixes are not installed directly in TL (new versions of packages should be uploaded to CTAN), or made by TL developers.
• If you have questions about using TeX, or need help achieving a particular result, please use the general help resources.
• To report a bug in TeX Live installation or infrastructure, please email the tex-live mailing list.

Highlights of changes in this release (details for LuaTeX, XeTeX, MetaPost). If you need to use alternate binaries, the custom binary support in the TL installer may prove useful.

Known issues in TeX Live 2013:

• In 2013, unusually, we have done one post-release round of rebuilds. This was for fixes to bugs in pdftex (to use libpng-1.5.16) and in MetaPost (for glyph distortions) that were reported at the very end of the cycle, and not (quite) critical enough to delay the release for. It is not at all imperative to get the new binaries; the idea was just to make them easily available if you run into the bugs. You can get the binaries either via tlmgr updates, or (if you don't want to also get other accumulated changes) simply download the binaries you need from the TL repository and move them in place.

• 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
  

• 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, ignore this.)

• On Windows, installation may fail for a variety of reasons. See the TeX Live on Windows page for some symptoms and remedies.

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