Excursus

MacTeX 2008 has just been released. Here are some of the new features:

• Packages in TeX Live 2008 can be updated over the internet. This is a major advance in the distribution. See documentation about the TeX Live Manager for details, and read the tlmgr man page. Additional documentation for the Mac is forthcoming; see the final paragraph of the previous section.
• Donald Knuth updates the TeX once every five or six years, fixing bugs that have accumulated over that time. This is an update year; TeX now has version number 3.1415926.
• pdfTeX has been updated to version 3.1415926-1.40.9.
• XeTeX has been updated to version 3.1415926-2.2-0.999.6; by default the program now uses the xdvipdfmx driver.
• luaTeX is in TeX Live 2008; this is a beta release of a program intended to eventually replace pdftex. To use the program, call it using one of the following commands: luatex, pdfluatex, lualatex, pdflualatex.
• Jerome Laurens’ new SyncTeX is included. This software causes pdfTeX, pdfeTeX, and XeTeX to output a “synctex” file during typesetting containing information to synchronize the source input and pdf output of a TeX run. In modern TeX distributions, pdfeTeX is used for almost all typesetting, since LaTeX and other engines are symbolically linked to that program, so SyncTeX is available for most typesetting jobs.

I have been waiting for this, not least because I want to dump pdfsync in favor of SyncTeX. However, the link to the zip file gives the following error “unknown error” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1). :( Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

Update: The MacTeX link is now live. I am downloading it now. \o/