TeX Live 2021 - 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 need to use alternate binaries, our recommended approach is the custom binary support in the TL installer.

For information on 64-bit Windows binaries, see the Windows on TeX Live page.

Known issues in TeX Live 2021

Bug archives for the previous release and earlier years remain online (under systems/texlive; both the initial release each year, and the frozen state at the end of the cycle in tlnet-final).

Notable changes

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

General

kpathsea
Nothing major; see full Kpathsea news for details.

aleph
The Aleph-based LaTeX format, named lamed, has been removed, due to new requirements . The aleph binary itself is still included and supported.

eptex, euptex
Nothing major; see full ChangeLogs for details.

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

metapost (full MetaPost news)

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

ptex (full pTeX news)
Nothing major.

xetex (full XeTeX news)
Fixes for math kerning.

dvipdfmx (full dvipdfmx news)

dvips (full dvips news)

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)

MacTeX
MacTeX and its new binary folder universal-darwin now require macOS 10.14 or higher (Mojave, Catalina, and Big Sur); the x86_64-darwin binary folder is no longer present. The x86_64-darwinlegacy binary folder, available only with the Unix install-tl, supports 10.6 and newer.

This is an important year for the Macintosh because Apple introduced ARM machines in November and will sell and support both ARM and Intel machines for many years. All programs in universal-darwin have executable code for both ARM and Intel. Both binaries are compiled from the same source code.

The additional programs Ghostscript, LaTeXiT, TeX Live Utility, and TeXShop are all universal and are signed with a hardened runtime, so all are included in MacTeX this year.


$Date: 2021/12/19 22:27:53 $; TeX Live;