** New Features in MacTeX-2010 and TeX Live 2010 **

TWG  |  MacTeX  |  Donate  |  FAQ  |  Fonts  |  Help  |  References  |  Support  |  Acknowledgments  |  TUG

MacTeX-2010

MacTeX-2010 installs updated versions of the GUI applications that were already in MacTeX-2009.

MacTeX has optional packages to install two font collections (Latin Modern and TeX Gyre) in /Library/Fonts; these TeX fonts are already in TeX Live, but installing them in /Library/Fonts makes them available to standard Macintosh applications like Adobe Illustrator. By default, these fonts are not installed.

MacTeX installs the latest version of Ghostscript, 8.71, and an updated "Convert" from ImageMagick 6.6.1. These packages are self-contained; MacTeX installs no libraries in /usr/local/lib.

TeX Live 2010

MacTeX-2010 installs a completely unmodified copy of the full TeX Live 2010 distribution. This is exactly the same distribution that runs on OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, various BSD Unix systems, and other systems.

MacTeX-2010 installs two binary directories. The first, universal-darwin, contains 32 bit binaries for both Intel and PowerPC processors; these run on all Macs which have OS X 10.3 or later. The second, x86_64-darwin, contains 64 bit Intel binaries compiled on Snow Leopard; these programs run only on Intel machines which are 64 bit capable and are running Snow Leopard. Our tests show that the 32 bit binaries run very fast on 64 bit machines, so most users won't notice the difference between these two sets of binaries. Since the 32 bit binaries run fine on Leopard, we had the luxury of compiling 64 bit binaries only for Snow Leopard, where we could use Apple's very latest libraries.

The TeX Distribution data structure for the 64 bit binaries is only installed by MacTeX on Snow Leopard machines which are 64 bit capable. If you are not running Snow Leopard when you install MacTeX, you will only see the 32 bit binaries. Snow Leopard users will see both sets of binaries in the TeX Distribution Preference Pane, and can switch between them.

A few programs in x86_64-darwin are still 32 bit versions, because it was not possible to compile 64 bit versions. This includes asy, xetex, and xindy.

Here are some new features in TeX Live 2010:

• New versions of many programs are provided, including Asymptote, LuaTeX, XeTeX, and many, many others.

• Will Robertson has provided fontspec.sty for LuaTeX; this makes it possible to use system fonts in LuaLaTeX in the same way that these fonts have been used in the past in XeLaTeX. A document in /Applications/TeX by Robertson gives more details.

• pdf(La)TeX now automatically converts a requested Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file to PDF, via the epstopdf package, when and if the LaTeX graphics.cfg configuration file is loaded, and PDF is being output. The default options are intended to eliminate any chance of hand-created PDF files being overwritten, but you can also prevent epstopdf from being loaded at all by putting \newcommand{\DoNotLoadEpstopdf}{} (or \def...) before the \documentclass declaration. It is also not loaded if the pst-pdf package is used. For more details, see the epstopdf package documentation (http://ctan.org/pkg/epstopdf-pkg [ctan.org]).
  This feature was already available in TeX Live 2009, but has been improved in TeX Live 2010. A document in /Applications/TeX gives details.

• A related change is that execution of a very few external commands from TeX, via the \write18 feature, is now enabled by default. These commands are repstopdf, makeindex, kpsewhich, bibtex, and bibtex8; the list is defined in texmf.cnf. Environments which must disallow all such external commands can deselect this option in the installer (see section 3.2.4), or override the value after installation by running
  tlmgr conf texmf shell_escape 0.

• Yet another related change is that BibTeX and Makeindex now refuse to write their output files to an arbitrary directory (like TeX itself), by default. This is so they can now be enabled for use by the restricted \write18. To change this, the TEXMFOUTPUT environment variable can be set, or the openout_any setting changed.

• In 2010, the default version for PDF output is now 1.5, enabling more compression. This applies to all the TeX engines when used to produce PDF and to dvipdfmx. Loading the pdf14 LaTeX package changes back to PDF 1.4, or set \pdfminorversion=4.

• XeTeX now supports margin kerning along the same lines as pdfTeX. (Font expansion is not presently supported.)

• By default, tlmgr now saves one backup of each package updated (tlmgr option autobackup 1), so broken packages updates can be easily reverted with tlmgr restore. If you do post-install updates, and don’t have the disk space for the backups, run:
  tlmgr option autobackup 0.

• New programs included: the pTeX engine and related utilities for typesetting Japanese; the BibTeXU program for Unicode-enabled BibTeX; the chktex utility (http://baruch.ev-en.org/proj/chktex [baruch.ev-en.org]) for checking (La)TeX documents; the dvisvgm (http://dvisvgm.sourceforge.net [dvisvgm.sourceforge.net]) DVI-to-SVG translator.

• A change in TeX Live 2009 that we failed to note: numerous TeX4ht-related executables (http://tug.org/tex4ht) were removed from the binary directories. The generic mk4ht program can be used to run any of the various tex4ht combinations.