TeX Live 2019 - 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.

Highlights of changes in this release; details for pdfTeX, LuaTeX, XeTeX, MetaPost, dvips.

If you need to use alternate binaries, the custom binary support in the TL installer may be useful.

Known issues in TeX Live 2019

Bug archives for the previous release and earlier years remain online (under systems/texlive).

Notable changes

As always, there are pervasive updates to packages and programs. We can't list them all, but here are major user-visible changes in the principal programs:

kpathsea (full Kpathsea news)
More consistent brace expansion and path splitting (details in the Kpathsea manual); new variable TEXMFDOTDIR instead of hardwired . in paths allows for easily searching additional or sub-directories (comments in texmf.cnf).
eptex, euptex
New primitives \readpapersizespecial and \expanded.
luatex (full LuaTeX news)
metapost (full MetaPost news)
pdftex (full pdfTeX news)
New primitive \expanded; if new primitive parameter \pdfomitcharset is set to 1, the /CharSet string omitted from the PDF output, since it cannot feasibly be guaranteed correct, as required by PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3.
xetex (full XeTeX news)
New primitives \expanded, \creationdate, \elapsedtime, \filedump, \filemoddate, \filesize, \resettimer, \normaldeviate, \uniformdeviate, \randomseed; extend \Ucharcat to produce active characters. More in the XeTeX manual.
tlmgr (full tlmgr news)
Support curl as a download program; use lz4 and gzip before xz for backups, if available; prefer system-provided binaries over TL-provided binaries for compressor and download programs, unless the environment variable TEXLIVE_PREFER_OWN is set.
install-tl
New option -gui (with no argument) is the default on Windows and Macs, and invokes a new Tcl/TK GUI, as described above.
MacTeX
x86_64-darwin now supports 10.12 and higher (Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave); x86_64-darwinlegacy supports 10.6 and newer. The spell checker Excalibur is no longer included, since it requires 32-bit support.
Utilities
Platforms
Removed sparc-solaris.

$Date: 2019/09/24 16:52:13 $; TeX Live;