How to test pdflatex-dev

[Phelype Oleinik]

On Mon, Mar 8, 2021 at 12:17 PM Xu Wang <xuwang762 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear list,
>
> What are different ways to test pdflatex-dev? I read the following news:
>
> https://www.latex-project.org/news/2021/03/05/latex-dev-2021-1/
>
> I have one system with TL2020 and one system with TL2021 pre-test. Can
> I test with each of them? Is there anything I need to do on them other
> than just tlmgr update? What is the expected output from pdflatex-dev

Hi Xu,

You just have to run on the command line:

    pdflatex-dev

instead of 'pdflatex'.  If you don't have it installed you need the
'latex-bin-dev' package (tlmgr install latex-bin-dev).  If you have it,
then LaTeX will tell you its version ID:

    LaTeX2e <2021-05-01> pre-release-1 (develop 2021-3-5 branch)

rather than the usual (current main release)

    LaTeX2e <2020-10-01> patch level 4


If you set paths appropriately, you should be able to run either
'pdflatex' or 'pdflatex-dev' with either TeX Live, but currently both
have the same version of LaTeX, so you shouldn't see any difference
between TL'20 and TL'21 in LaTeX for now.

Thanks for testing!

Best,
Phelype