The LaTeX team is pleased to announce the December 1999 release of LaTeX (which has been available from CTAN since 11th January 2000). The team has today released a patch to fix a small bug in picture mode; users who had already upgraded to the new release are urged to pick up this patch and to regenerate their formats. Very little has changed in the LaTeX kernel in this release, but a package `fixltx2e' is now available. This package represents an attempt to address the recurrent issue of things that ought to be changed, but cannot be for fear of the effect of change on legacy documents. New versions of some packages in the cyrillic, graphics and tools bundles in the latex/required directories have also been released. Details of the release, and further information about the development of LaTeX, are to be found in LaTeX news issue 12 (file ltnews12.tex in the distribution -- please note that this issue requires the latest ltnews.cls from the distribution). Robin Fairbairns For the LaTeX Team