[OS X TeX] MacTeX-2014 Pretest

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

Construction and beta testing of TeX Live 2014 has begun and a 
test version of MacTeX-2014 is now available. See

	https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html

Please remember that this is a beta version. You may run into
problems. 

If you decide to test, be sure not to erase your current TeX Live 2013
distribution. You can return to it if a problem emerges in the 2014 version.

Currently on Mavericks the TeX Dist Pref Pane is broken; we expect
that it will be fixed by final release. The beta version of MacTeX
contains a temporary replacement in /Applications/TeX for
Maverick users.

The Tug Pretest page concentrates on downloads for Unix or Windows
users and it takes a little deciphering to figure out how to get to the
pretest servers and download mactex-2014.pkg. Think of this as a
preliminary debugging task for those willing to test MacTeX.

The more testing, the better.


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About This Release:

1) Last year we provided Ghostscript 9.07. The new package has Ghostscript 9.10.
Ghostscript 9.14 was released a couple of weeks ago, but it has significant
TeX-related bugs and will not be used.

2) Convert from ImageMagick is no longer supplied because this year's tex4ht uses
Ghostscript to image some of its elements for the web. To convert between graphic
formats on the Mac, use Apple's Preview or Apple's command line program sips.

3) We no longer supply the Latin-Modern and TeX Gyre fonts for use outside TeX,
because users can create links in the Apple font directories to any open-type
TeX fonts they wish to use.

4) Donald Knuth patches bugs on a regular but sparse schedule. The last patches
were in 2008, his 2014 patches are in the new packages, and he'll visit the
issue again in 2020.

5) MacTeX and BasicTeX are for Intel and PowerPC processors on Leopard and above.

6) Last year's MacTeX had size 2.36 GB. This year's MacTeX has size 2.48 GB. MacTeX-2014
installs in approximately one minute on a Retina machine with flash storage.

7) Further details are available on the Tug Pretest Page.

Dick Koch