May 27, 2023

Final pre-release of LaTeX 2023-06-01 is available for testing

We submitted the final pre-release version for the 2023-06-01 LaTeX kernel to CTAN recently. It should have made its way into TeX Live for everyone by now (or pretty soon), so it’s ready for users and developers to try.

We did not manage to get everything in that we originally planned for the June release, but given that the newsletter has seven pages is some indication that we have been busy. Please test it out so that we all can be sure that the main release has no issues. Given that we are somewhat late in the schedule we will delay the June release by a week or two so that developers can verify that their packages will work smoothly with the new release.

Automated tagging of PDF documents

We have now enabled new automatic tagging functionality for additional LaTeX elements, among them most display environments, standard sectioning commands and content, figure and table listings. Also supported are standard floats, citations, bibliographies and a few more elements, but we aren’t yet at the point that we can state that all elements described in Leslie Lamport’s manual on LaTeX are supported — but we are getting close.

This can be activated through

\DocumentMetadata{testphase=phase-III}
\documentclass{...}                     % article, book or report

In addition there is also an early prototype for tagging formulas, which can be activated through

\DocumentMetadata{testphase={phase-III,math}}
\documentclass{...}

It offers support for LaTeX’s standard math environments and also for all environments provided through the amsmath package.

All of this automation is currently in a prototype state and restricted to the use of standard classes (article, report, and book) and it supports only a limited number of add-on package. See the LaTeX2e News Issue 37 newsletter for further details. It provides information how to submit feedback on the new functionality.

The newsletter also covers various other small enhancements or corrections that we provide with the June release.

Testing

Processing your documents with the pre-release is straightforward. All you have to do is to replace the invocation command by appending -dev to the executable, e.g., on the command line you would run

  • pdflatex-dev myfile or
  • lualatex-dev myfile or
  • xelatex-dev myfile

instead of using pdflatex, lualatex or xelatex. If you use an integrated editing environment, then it depends on the system how to configure it to use an alternative format; but in any case the necessary modification should be straightforward.

Enjoy — Frank