Annual update released for TeX Live

The developers of the TeX Live distribution of LaTeX have released their annual update. However, after 17 years of development, the changes in TeX Live 2013 mostly amount to technical details.

The texmf/ directory, for example, has been merged into texmf-dist/, while the TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFDIST Kpathsea variables now point to texmf-dist. The developers have also merged several language collections for easier installation. Users will find native support for PNG output and floating-point numbers in MetaPost. LuaTeX now uses version 5.2 of Lua and includes a new library (pdfscanner) for processing external PDF data, and xdvi now uses freetype instead of t1lib for rendering.

Several updates have been made to XeTeX: HarfBuzz is now used instead of ICU for font layout and has been combined with Graphite2 to replace SilGraphite for Graphite layout; support has also been improved for OpenType.

TeX Live 2013 is open source software, licensed under a combination of the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) and a number of other licences. The software works on all of the major operating systems, although the program no longer runs on AIX systems using PowerPCs. Mac OS X users may want to take a look at MacTeX, which is based on – and has been updated in line with – TeX Live.

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