Hello all, The team have been working for the last few months on various updates for LaTeX2e. These are in some ways significant changes and are aimed at helping to ensure that LaTeX as seen by end users is properly supported by the team. Before making a general release of the code to CTAN we are keen that there is time for proper testing without any risk to 'production' documents. As noted below, there are also areas that may have a knock-on effect for other people and which therefore may need discussion/co-ordination. To enable this to take place, we have placed the current code in 'CTAN upload' format on DropBox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mh8c67bxidryr8h/AAAu4_Ez66syXyKwL3J83nn_a?dl=0. There are a number of changes in the development version of LaTeX2e compared with the current release. The following summarises the important points. *Controlling (kernel) changes* The "fixltx2e" mechanism has been used for a number of years to allow changes to the kernel which alter behaviours. However, the use of fixltx2e is patchy at best and interactions with third-party packages can be difficult to test as a result. We have therefore moved to a new approach to this area. The fixes previously covered by fixltx2e are now built in to the kernel, with a mechanism provided by the new package "latexrelease" to back them out. This new package is also designed such that it can be used by third parties and so should enable a route toward having a single date for all code used by a LaTeX document. *e-TeX* For several years the team have specified that e-TeX is expected for using LaTeX but have not provided any way to use the extended registers that it makes available. In this release, the allocation routine is reworked such that if e-TeX is available the full range of registers is used 'out of the box'. In addition, an allocator for \marks (\newmarks) is set up. The availability of the e-TeX registers also provides an opportunity to make more floats available in LaTeX. A new command \extrafloats is provided to do this. Note that no additional inserts are required for this process. *Unicode engines* Over recent years the use of XeTeX and LuaTeX has required .ini files which 'fix' various LaTeX2e kernel behaviours to allow successful format building with these Unicode engines. In the upcoming release the team have sought to incorporate these changes into the kernel itself such that the .ini files need only cover code which is truly 'local' to a TeX distribution. (We have included suggested .ini files for a TeX Live-like set up in the DropBox folder.) The upcoming release is 'aware' of XeTeX/LuaTeX and make appropriate adjustments. Most notably, the kernel now assumes T1 codes *only* for 8-bit engines and uses a new set of Unicode data to set catcode/lccode/uccode/Umathcode data when using XeTeX or LuaTeX. This follows the existing behaviour of xelatex.ini and lualatex.ini in TeX Live/MiKTeX. The data for these settings has been taken from the latest Unicode release (7.0) and will be updated appropriately. As part of this work on Unicode engines we have added \newXeTeXintercharclass and associated mechanisms as currently included in xelatex.ini. For LuaTeX, primitives are enabled following the scheme currently adopted by TeX Live/MiKTeX. We have not at this stage addressed attributes, callbacks or other areas that need new allocators. We hope that over the coming months interested parties will work with us to develop a coherent scheme in this area to be added to a future LaTeX2e release. *TDS-style zip files and hyperlinks docs* The team have moved to a new build system (l3build) and this now enables us to provide 'ready to install' TDS-style zip files for all of the kernel code. At the same time, we have adopted ideas from Heiko Oberdiek's "latex-tds" bundle and enabled hyperlinking in the PDF documentation provided with LaTeX. We hope this should mean that TeX system providers can use the team's code and documentation directly for their releases. *Feedback* The team are very keen to hear feedback on all aspects of the upcoming release. We are particularly hoping that TeX system maintainers, those working heavily with XeTeX/LuaTeX and more generally that package authors will test the new code before any wider distribution. -- Joseph Wright