Hi there, anybody who wants to help with beta-testing upcoming LaTeX releases is invited to do so now. I'm glad to be able to say that is is now a piece of cake and doesn't require any local installation, compiling formats, etc. any more. Instead, all you have to do is to call a different program name as explained below. We therefore hope that sufficiently many people are willing to help us in testing in the wild and thus track down any remaining issues (if any) that haven't been caught already by our own internal regression testing. Right now you can already test pre-release-2, which among a few other things contains better UTF-8 support for pdfTeX, e.g., you can now safely use UTF-8 characters in file names, labels, reference, citations etc. More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in changes.txt and ltnews30.tex (but you have to find these files on your machine yourself at the moment and compile the .tex file --- some room for improvements no doubt). Between now and the final fall release of LaTeX there will be at least one more pre-release (with the remaining features we planned for this release), I will announce that separately. As the whole process is new, we appreciate feedback and also would like to learn if we get sufficient serious testers now that it is much easier than it has been in the past. thanks frank ps the dev format is available for all major engines: dvilualatex-dev lualatex-dev platex-dev xelatex-dev latex-dev pdflatex-dev uplatex-dev ------ from the recent post at www.latex-project.org LaTeX development formats are now available =========================================== We know that many of you, especially developers and maintainers of important packages, have a strong interest in a stable LaTeX environment. In order to keep LaTeX very stable for users whilst allowing for further development to continue, we now have a development branch of LaTeX on GitHub containing development code for the upcoming release. When this code is ready for wider consumption and testing, we generate a pre-release of LaTeX from this development branch and make it available on CTAN. For users of the TeXLive and MikTeX distributions it is therefore now straightforward to test their documents and code against the upcoming LaTeX release with ease, simply by selecting a different program name (when using the command line) or by selecting a menu entry (after setting it up, see below). If you do this then the latest version of the LaTeX development format will be used to process your document, allowing you to test the upcoming release with your own documents and packages. For example, if you run pdflatex-dev myfile then you will be greeted on the screen with LaTeX2e <2019-10-01> pre-release-2 (identifying the pre-release format) instead of the normal LaTeX2e <2018-12-01>. In this pre-release you will find the latest new features that we have developed. Here is an example of upcoming features that are currently only in the pre-release format: better UTF8-handling as described in Taming UTF-8 in pdfTeX: https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbyyear/2019 Note, that these are not `nightly builds' of the format reflecting the very latest stage of development, but pre-release versions that we have tested ourselves so that we consider them ready for testing by a broader community, prior to their public release. Our hopes --------- We don’t expect everybody to start using the development formats to participate in testing, but we hope that people with a strong interest in a stable LaTeX environment (especially developers and maintainers of important packages) will use the new facilities and help us to ensure that future public releases of LaTeX do not (as has happened in the past) require some immediate patches because of issues that were not identified by our internal regression test suite or by other testing that we do. Any issue identified when using the development format should preferably be logged as an issue on GitHub, following the procedure outlined in https://www.latex-project.org/bugs/ including the use of the latexbug package as described. Our bug reporting process normally states that issues involving third-party software are out of scope as we can’t correct external packages. However, in the particular case of the development format showing an incompatibility with a third-party package, it is fine to open an issue with us (in addition, please, to informing the maintainer of that package) so that we know about the problem and can jointly work on resolving it. Details please ... ------------------ More details and some background information about the concepts and the process is available in an upcoming TUGboat article: `The LaTeX release workflow and the LaTeX dev formats' also available from https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbyyear/2019 Setting up menu items --------------------- While the command line call works out of the box if you have a recent uptodate TeXLive or MikTeX installation, the use within an integrated editing environment doesn’t at this point in time (maybe the developers of these editors will include it in the future). However, it is normally fairly simple to enable it as most (or even all?) of them provide simple ways to call your own setup. How this works in detail depends very much on the environment you use, so we can’t give much help here. But as an example: to provide an additional menu entry for XeLaTeX-dev all I had to do was to copy the file XeLaTeX.engine to XeLaTeX-dev.engine and change the call from xelatex to xelatex-dev inside.