As announced at the TeX Users Group meeting (Summer 1997), a group of highly experimental packages will has (somewhat belated) been released to allow experienced TeX programmers to experiment with, and comment on, a proposed set of syntax conventions and basic data-types that might form the basis for programming large scale projects in TeX. They are located in this CTAN directory: CTAN:macros/latex/packages/expl3 The documentation of this material is as follows: individual package files provide outline, draft documentation; there is an article that gives an overview of the syntax and related concepts; there is a readme.txt file containing a brief description of the collection. All aspects of these packages are liable, indeed likely, to change. They should not be used at this stage for anything that requires a stable system. However, we do encourage people to experiment with these packages, and to send comments on them to the LaTeX-L mailing list. To subscribe to this list, mail to: [log in to unmask] the following one line message: subscribe LATEX-L <<first-name>> <<second-name>> We are sorry that it has taken so long to prepare this for distribution. The LaTeX Team