Pretesting TeX Live 2023

The entire TeX Live community greatly benefits from all testing before the official release. The more people who test in advance, the better the final release can be. It is also the best opportunity to influence and improve the behavior of TL. Please give it a try if you can.

As distributed, the pretest will not interfere with any existing installations of TeX, either native TeX Live or operating system distributions.

On this page: downloading - installing - testing - updating - reporting - migrating - news.

Downloading

You can retrieve the pretest files from one of these hosts: copy-paste an http or ftp url when running the installer directly, or use an rsync url for mirroring, as described below. Our thanks to these sites for making their space and bandwidth available. And more mirrors are welcome.

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="*.pkg*" somemirror::/some/path/ /your/local/dir
  Add -v if you want to see the names of the files as they are transferred.
  Add -L if your system does not support symbolic links.
  Full rsync documentation.

  After mirroring the directory, run the install-tl script, below.

  You can use wget or other tools to mirror via http or ftp if you must. Regardless of the method, do not fail to exclude mactex* or you will be doubling the (already large) transfer.

  On the other hand, if you are only interested in MacTeX, you can mirror/download only the full mactex-*.pkg file (several gb) or mactex-basictex-*.pkg (100+mb), as in, for the full MacTeX:
  rsync -a --delete --include="mactex-2*" --exclude="*" somemirror::/some/path/ /your/local/dir

For regular installations via download (i.e., not mirroring), we highly recommend installing the LWP Perl package if you don't have it.

The pretest build runs nightly, ending by 04:00 Copenhagen time unless something goes wrong. The mirror hosts should all be up to date within a few hours after that. (Current time in Denmark: .)

Installing

After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl-windows.bat (Windows) to perform the installation. We just use install-tl as the command name in these examples:

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 the location urls). The location must be an ftp or http url (not rsync).

But in the case of installing from your own mirrored repository, you should omit -repository location from the given command lines.

• install-tl -repository location -gui text
  for text (command line) mode; this is the default on normal Unix, but not on Windows or Macs.

• install-tl -repository location -gui
  is the default on Windows and Macs. It runs a Tcl/Tk-based GUI if Tcl/Tk is available, simple at startup but with a button to invoke the advanced interface. If Tcl/Tk is not available, falls back to text mode. TeX Live includes a Tcl/Tk runtime for Windows.

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 and pdflatex sample2e. If that works, even more useful is to try your real-life documents, to check that they still work as expected. If third-party packages have changed incompatibly, their maintainers should be contacted directly.

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 (archive). Bugs about specific packages should be reported to the package maintainers; TeX Live's basic job is to install (some of) what is on CTAN, not make changes on top of it. Resources for general questions and help using TeX are available.

Migrating from the pretest to the release

The last pretest build is usually close to the official release. If you are using the standard directory setup, you can rename your pretest installation (say, /usr/local/texlive/pretest) to the per-year directory (/usr/local/texlive/2023) and change your search path. The other change you will most likely need to make is to take updates from CTAN again: tlmgr option repo ctan.

Then, after the release is made, a normal update (tlmgr update --self --all) should sync with whatever changes were made after the last pretest. The result should be equivalent to doing a full installation.

Notable changes

The main TeX Live documentation is mostly updated; the translations are in progress.

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

Windows

As announced previously, TeX Live now contains 64-bit Windows binaries instead of 32-bit. The new directory name is bin/windows (it did not seem right to put 64-bit binaries into a directory named with “32”). We know this will cause extra work for Windows users, but there seemed no better alternative. See the separate TeX Live Windows page for more.

Cross-engine extensions

In engines except for original TeX and e-TeX:

• \special followed by a new keyword “shipout” delays expansion of the argument tokens until \shipout time, as with a non-\immediate\write.

euptex (full ChangeLog)

• “Raw” (u)ptex no longer built; (u)ptex now runs in e(u)ptex's compatibility mode. Same for pTeX tools, listed below.
• New primitives: \tojis, \ptextracingfonts, \ptexfontname.
• For \font, new syntax for JIS/UCS is supported.

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

• new primitive \variablefam to allow math characters to keep their class while still letting the family adapt.
• improved r2l annotation areas
• cross-engine “late \special” described above.

metapost (full MetaPost news)

Bug fixes: svg->dx and svg->dy are now double, for better precision; mp_begin_iteration updated; memory leak in mplib fixed.

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

• new primitive \pdfomitinfodict to omit /Info dictionary completely.
• new primitive \pdfomitprocset to control omitting /ProcSet array: /ProcSet is included if this parameter is negative, or if this parameter is zero and pdftex is generating PDF 1.x output.
• with \pdfinterwordspaceon, if the current font's encoding has a /space character at slot 32, it is used; otherwise, the /space from the (new) default font pdftexspace is used. That default font can be overridden with the new primitive \pdfspacefont. This same new procedure is used for \pdffakespace.

ptex et al. (full pTeX news)

• As mentioned above, ptex now runs eptex in compatibility mode instead of being built separately.
• pTeX tools (pbibtex, pdvitype, ppltotf, ptftopl) merged into corresponding upTeX versions, running in compatibility mode.

xetex (full XeTeX news)

bug fix for \topskip and \splittopskip computation when \XeTeXupwardsmode is active; the cross-engine “late \special” described above.

dvipdfmx (full dvipdfmx news)

• new option --pdfm-str-utf8 to make pdfmark and/or bookmark.

bibtexu (full bibtexu news)

• This BibTeX variant is mostly upward-compatible with bibtex, with much better (Unicode-based) multilingual support. It's been in TL for some years.
• This year, more features to support CJK languages have been added, some extended from the Japanese (u)pbibtex and other programs.

kpathsea (full Kpathsea news)

Support guessing input file encodings for Unix-ish platforms, as on Windows; enabled for (e)p(la)tex, pbibtex, mendex.

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)

• default to text interface on macOS.
• install core packages first, retry other packages once.
• simplistic checks for enough disk space.

MacTeX

• MacTeX and its binary folder universal-darwin require macOS 10.14 or higher (Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura). The x86_64-darwinlegacy binary folder, available only with the Unix install-tl, supports 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and later.
• The GUI package in MacTeX now contains hintview, a macOS viewer for HINT documents (created by the hitex and hilatex engines for mobile devices; see the HiTeX web page for more). The GUI package no longer installs a folder of documents, replacing them with a short READ ME for new users and a page about hintview.
• The Extras folder of additional TeX sofware on the DVD has been replaced with a document containing links to download sites.

Platforms

• As mentioned above, the new windows binary directory contains 64-bit Windows binaries, and
• the bin/win32 binary directory is gone, since we cannot support 32-bit and 64-bit Windows simultaneously.
• The i386-cygwin binary directory is gone, since Cygwin no longer supports i386.

If you discover other changes that should be noted, please report them. Such documentation improvements are useful to many people.