Pretesting TeX Live 2025

The entire TeX Live community greatly benefits from all testing before the official release. The more people who test in advance, the better the final release can be. It is also the best opportunity to influence and improve the behavior of TL. Please give it a try if you can.

As distributed, the pretest will not interfere with any existing installations of TeX, either native TeX Live or operating system distributions.

On this page: downloading - installing - testing - updating - reporting - migrating - news.

Downloading

You can retrieve the pretest files from one of these hosts: copy-paste an https or ftp url when running the installer directly, or use an rsync url for mirroring, as described below. Our thanks to these sites for making their space and bandwidth available. And more mirrors are welcome.

You can do a network installation of TL, or mirror the whole tlpretest directory, or start from an existing up-to-date installation:

For regular installations via download (i.e., not mirroring), we highly recommend installing the LWP Perl package if you don't already have it.

The pretest build runs nightly, ending by 04:00 Copenhagen time unless something goes wrong. The mirror hosts should all be up to date within a few hours after that. (Current time in Denmark: Monday, 10-Feb-2025 18:49:31 CET.)

Installing

After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl-windows.bat (Windows) to perform the installation. We just use install-tl as the command name in these examples:

If you are performing a network installation, the pretest repository location from which to install must be specified, as shown in these examples (see downloading above for the location urls). The location must be an ftp or http url (not rsync).

But in the case of installing from your own mirrored repository, you should omit -repository location from the given command lines.

For information on all of the installer options, run install-tl --help, or see the install-tl documentation page.

Testing

After a successful installation, please first try simple test documents, such as latex small2e and pdflatex sample2e. If that works, even more useful is to try your real-life documents, to check that they still work as expected. If third-party packages have changed incompatibly, their maintainers should be contacted directly.

Updating

After a successful installation, you can update from the tlpretest repository using tlmgr from time to time, if you wish. In the event of unusually drastic changes during the pretest you may have to reinstall.

Reporting problems

Please email bug reports, suggestions, comments on TeX Live itself (the installation process, tlmgr, etc.) to tex-live@tug.org (archive). Bugs about specific packages should be reported to the package maintainers; TeX Live's basic job is to install (some of) what is on CTAN, not make changes on top of it. Resources for general questions and help using TeX are available.

Migrating from the pretest to the release

The last pretest build is usually close to the official release. If you are using the standard directory setup, you can rename your pretest installation (say, /usr/local/texlive/pretest) to the per-year directory (/usr/local/texlive/2025) and change your search path. The other change you will most likely need to make is to take updates from CTAN again: tlmgr option repo ctan.

Then, after the release is made, a normal update (tlmgr update --self --all) should sync with whatever changes were made after the last pretest. The result should be equivalent to doing a full installation.

Initializing from a current installation

For people comfortable with the command line: if you have an up-to-date TL installation, you can use it as the basis for the pretest installation instead of downloading everything again. In short:

cd /usr/local/texlive  # adjust path as needed if not default
mkdir pretest
ls pretest  # check that you're starting with an empty dir

cd 2024     # cd to directory of your current/up-to-date TL installation

# do the big copy, preserving symlinks:
nice -19 cp -ar *.* bin/ README install-tl texmf-{dist,local} tlpkg ../pretest/

cd /usr/local/texlive/pretest
PATH=`pwd`/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH       # or whatever current platform
wget PRETEST-URL/update-tlmgr-latest.sh # or curl, whatever
sh update-tlmgr-latest.sh
tlmgr option repo PRETEST-URL
tlmgr update --self && tlmgr update --all

Then you'll probably want to permanently adjust your PATH so the new binaries are found first, in whatever way you usually do.

The critical thing here is the cp. The -a option to GNU cp preserves symlinks; if your cp doesn't have that, use tar or another method to do the copy instead of cp. Symlinks must be preserved.

The PRETEST-URL placeholder string means one of the pretest repositories.

Notable changes

Updates to the main TeX Live documentation and the translations are in progress, as is the list of changes.

As always, there are pervasive updates to packages and programs. We can't list them all, but here are the major user-visible changes in the principal programs since the initial TL24 release:

Cross-engine updates

luatex (full LuaTeX news)

metapost (full MetaPost news)

pdftex (full pdfTeX news)

(e)(u)ptex (full ChangeLog)

xetex (full XeTeX news)
Cross-engine updates noted above.

cweb (full cweb news)

dvipdfmx (full dvipdfmx news)

dvips (full dvips news)
Support upTeX new encoding for combining characters via virtual fonts.

kpathsea (full Kpathsea news)
kpsewhich outputs a blank line when a given file cannot be found, if more than one file to search for is specified.

tlmgr (full tlmgr news)
General
updmap creates the generically-named output files as copies by default.

Windows
Visual Basic usage in uninstall-windows and runscript.tlu has been replaced by Powershell, since VB is optional as of Windows 11.

MacTeX
Again this year, MacTeX-2025 supports both Arm and Intel processors ron macOS 10.14, Mojave, and higher. In addition to TeX Live, it installs:

Platforms
The x86_64-linux binaries are now built on Alma Linux 8, since support for CentOS 7 (even for security updates) ended as of June 30, 2024. We regret this but see no alternative. Binaries for older systems are available from other sources.

If you discover other changes that should be noted, please report them. Such documentation improvements are useful for the whole TeX Live community.


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