The November 2022 release of LaTeX is available

More or less on time we released the 2022-11-01 version of LaTeX and by now it should be available in all major distributions. This release is largely a consolidation release. However it also contains one very important enhancement that is initially important for package developers, but over time — when the kernel and packages starting using it — will become relevant for user documents.

I’m talking about the fact that we prepared the grounds to use optional key/value arguments with basically any command including those that current have optional arguments expecting a simple value. For example, \chapter or \caption allow an optional argument to hold the data for the TOC or LOF file. With the new functionality they can be changed (not done yet) to alternatively support a key/value list in this argument and LaTeX will automatically determine which version applies. This is very important for providing a standard and consistent method for accessible LaTeX documents, because there has to be a possibility to specify “alternative text” in various places. There are other reasons related to the Tagged PDF project why such an interface is useful and the beauty of it is that it is both consistent and upward compatible.

To get a good overview about the new features and most of the important bug fixes made in this release take a look at “LaTeX2e News Issue 36”. This document should be accessible through texdoc ltnews36 on your computer and can also be found on the LaTeX2e news page where you will also find release information for earlier LaTeX releases.

Happy LaTeXing — Frank