When I stumbled upon tabu
some time ago it looked quite interesting on a first glance and I intended to learn more about it when I have the time.
But, in the comments section of this question posted on the new german question and answer site texwelt.de
Herbert Voß wrote that the tabu
package is obsolete in its current version (thereby citing the package author) and is not actively maintained anymore.
What are the implications for the usability of the package?
Should I refrain from investing time to learn tabu
and consider some other packages for the creation of tables instead?
[Tex/LaTex] Is the tabu package obsolete
obsoletetabu
Best Answer
Update January 2019
Due to issues of
tabu
with recent changes in the LaTeX kernel, maintenance of the package has been taken up by a working group at tabu-fixed/tabu.The aim of the working group is to fix the issues. Further development of the package is not planned at the moment.
Update July 2022
A possible modern alternative could be
tabularray
which was introduced in 2021.Original answer
In a thread on
comp.text.tex
the author oftabu
stated that bug fixes to the current version (2.8) oftabu
will not be taken under consideration:See Incompatibility between verbatim and tabu? (Danger of using \scantokens in a package) for the motivation of Bruno Le Floch's question.
I asked back
The answer was
To make the story short, here's an excerpt from a subsequent message (the first line is my question):
The conclusions I can draw is that using
tabu
in its current version is dangerous, because its author has announced incompatible changes for the next version. And he doesn't care if people using his package are thrown under the bus.