TeX Live 2023 released

Get the Champagne ready, we have released the final images of TeX Live 2023.

The biggest change in this year’s release is the switch to 64bit Windows binaries, and renaming the binary directory from win32 to windows. This change triggered updates in several additional repositories, like tlcontrib and tlgpg:

• tlcontrib’s current points to 2023 and cannot be used with older versions

, use the respective year directly instead of current

• tlgpg as is can only be used with TL 2023. If you need tlgpg for TL2022 and before, use tlgpg-2022 instead of tlgpg

Another interesting change is the inclusion of luametatex, a new engine which is used for ConTeXt. Development is fast in this area, so I expect that the binary will soon be out-of-date.

One of the things I have done over the last year is making tlmgr/install-tl more stable with respect to intermittent errors. In particular, we now install the necessary core packages immediately, and fail fast if there is a problem. Non-essential packages are installed afterwards and retried on error, but failures do not terminate the installation. This should help get a working installation on the first run.

Thanks goes to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release!

Finally, here are the changes as listed in the master TeX Live documentation:

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 web page (https://tug.org/texlive/windows.html).

Cross-engine extensions (except in 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.

epTeX, eupTeX:

• “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:

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

pdfTeX:

• 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.:

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

Dvipdfmx: new option –pdfm-str-utf8 to make pdfmark and/or bookmark.

BibTeXu:

• This BibTeX variant is mostly upward-compatible with BibTeX, with much better (Unicode-based) multilingual support. It’s been in TeX Live 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: Support guessing input file encodings for Unix-ish platforms, as on Windows; enabled for (e)p(la)tex, pbibtex, mendex.

tlmgr and infrastructure:

• default to text interface on macOS.
• install core packages first, retry other packages once.
• simplistic checks are done 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, https://hint.userweb.mwn.de/hint/hitex.html). 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.

That’s all, let the fun begin! And again, thanks to all the developers, builders, the great CTAN team, and everyone who has contributed to this release!