[Tex/LaTex] TeXLive 2011 – what’s new, what is no longer available – i.e. what should be known before upgrading

texlive

According to http://www.tug.org/texlive/ TeXLive 2011 is almost released, so it's a good moment to initiate some early reports about it, especially:

what it brings new to the table – e.g. killer features (packages?),
what it takes from us – e.g. if you heavily depend on this or that, know that you'll have to go the other way,
upgrade pitfalls – e.g. if you're XYZ distro user, as I, you must be aware of …

It will help others to make their minds about upgrading or delaying such decision for reasons stated in answers, e.g. describing some (hopefully they will be only minor) bothering problems.

Best Answer

The TEX Live Guide for TeX Live 2011 has in section 9 Release history following information about present version (page 39):

2011 saw relatively few changes.

The Mac OS X binaries (universal-darwin and x86_64-darwin) now work only on Leopard or later; Panther and Tiger are no longer supported.

The biber program for bibliography processing is included on common platforms. Its development is closely coupled with the biblatex package, which completely reimplements the bibliographical facilities provided by LaTeX.

The MetaPost (mpost) program no longer creates or uses .mem files. The needed files, such as plain.mp, are simply read on every run. This is related to supporting MetaPost as a library, which is another significant though not user-visible change.

The updmap implementation in Perl, previously used only on Windows, has been revamped and is now used on all platforms. There shouldn’t be any user-visible changes as a result, except that it runs much faster.

Now for the packages the tkz collection arrives. :)
I think this is not very important because if you use tlmgr on unix or TeX live Utility on OS X, packages can be updated day after day with TL2010 or 2011.
(my english is not good; when TL2011 is in pretest TL2010 has been frozen, so we need TL 2011 to update with tlmgr or TeX live Utility)

I think it is important to use TL2011 to help the texlive community to continue releasing new and better versions. We can send corrections and suggestions.

It's possible to have two distributions (2010 and 2011) during several weeks and then you can make a choice. Actually I work only with TL2011 and pgf 2.1 cvs. I test every day.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Upgrading to texlive 2011

Your installation is working fine. If the update didn't work, you wouldn't get the no updates available message (which actually means what it says) but instead you would have an error message like:

The supported release as specified by the repository (2011)
does not match the release version of the installation (2010), bailing out.

As the comments say, just way a few days for updates to appear. Karl re-enabled them for tonight, so if everything's fine, you should start seeing updates in a few days.

[Tex/LaTex] What’s a simple way to migrate a TeXWorks (Windows) configuration from TexLive 2010 to 2011

As Herbert said, there's a .texliveYYYY folder in your home directory.

So for question 1 (where are the TeXworks files?), in my relatively untouched install, there's a .texliveYYY\texmf-config\texworks folder with the following:

 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is B068-2864

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              completion
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              configuration
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              dictionaries
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              scripts
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              translations
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              TUG
07/22/2011  06:12 PM             1,277 TwFileVersions.db
               1 File(s)          1,277 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\completion

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             1,165 tw-basic.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             1,903 tw-beamer.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM                53 tw-context.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM            20,182 tw-latex.txt
               4 File(s)         23,303 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\configuration

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               803 auto-indent-patterns.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               215 delimiter-pairs.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               377 smart-quotes-modes.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             1,704 syntax-patterns.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             1,208 tag-patterns.txt
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             1,590 texworks-config.txt
               6 File(s)          5,897 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\dictionaries

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
               0 File(s)              0 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\scripts

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              Hooks
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              LaTeX styles
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               278 launchPdf.js
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               392 makeBold.lua
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               379 makeBold.py
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               476 system.js
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              Text transforms
               4 File(s)          1,525 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\scripts\Hooks

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             1,795 babelLanguage.js
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             4,446 latexErrors.js
               2 File(s)          6,241 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\scripts\LaTeX styles

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               825 toggleBold.js
07/08/2011  11:10 AM               827 toggleEmph.js
               2 File(s)          1,652 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\scripts\Text transforms

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/08/2011  11:10 AM             2,527 titlecase.js
               1 File(s)          2,527 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\translations

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
               0 File(s)              0 bytes

 Directory of C:\Users\me\.texlive2010\texmf-config\texworks\TUG

07/08/2011  11:10 AM              .
07/08/2011  11:10 AM              ..
07/22/2011  06:12 PM            10,030 TeXworks.ini
               1 File(s)         10,030 bytes

     Total Files Listed:
              21 File(s)         52,452 bytes
              29 Dir(s)  376,468,918,272 bytes free

For questions 2-3 (how to merge or use all of the old settings?), I'd backup the settings from both the older version and 2011, and then check them for differences, or possibly just overwrite the new files with the old contents. An editor like Notepad++ can make the file comparison simpler, if you don't already have better tools for that.

For question 4 (how to set file associations?), I think TeX Live Manager will handle that. Start the new version's tlmgr, and go to "Options / General". There's a "Change file associations" entry there that can be set to none, new, or all.

enter image description here

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Upgrading to texlive 2011

[Tex/LaTex] What’s a simple way to migrate a TeXWorks (Windows) configuration from TexLive 2010 to 2011

Related Question