** New Features in MacTeX-2008 and TeX Live 2008 **

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MacTeX-2008

MacTeX-2008 installs updated versions of the GUI applications that were already in MacTeX-2007.

MacTeX has optional packages to install two font collections (Latin Modern and TeX Gyre) in /Library/Fonts; these TeX fonts are already in TeX Live, but installing them in /Library/Fonts makes them available to standard Macintosh applications like Adobe Illustrator. By default, these fonts are not installed.

Last year, the remaining packages in MacTeX were copies of packages distributed by Gerben Wierda: Ghostscript, ImageMagick, and various Font Utilities. In MacTeX-2008, none of these packages come from Gerben's distributions; instead the latest versions of these software pieces have been compiled from scratch. The Font Utilities have been eliminated completely. MacTeX-2008 contains Ghostscript 8.63; this distribution should be virtually the same as Gerben's Ghostscript package. But ImageMagick has been pared down to a single utility, "convert", which is sometimes used to convert between graphic formats and is required by Tex4ht.

Because Gerben installed several different programs which used the same libraries, he installed several shared libraries in /usr/local/lib. These libraries could then be picked up by other components of the system which had nothing to do with TeX; that was both good and bad. MacTeX-2008 installs no libraries at all. The programs we install are stand alone binaries which are not intwined with the rest of the operating system. This was a major goal of the new packages for Ghostscript and ImageMagick.

Finally, MacTeX-2008 installs some documentation about TeX Live's new TeX Live Manager in /Applications/TeX/Utilities. It also adds an install package for Perl/Tk to this location, so the X11-based front end to TeX Live Manager can be run on the Mac. Users who do not install the GUI-Applications portion of MacTeX-2008 will not receive these pieces. It is our intention to add links to the documentation and install package on this page soon.

TeX Live 2008

MacTeX-2008 installs a completely unmodified copy of the full TeX Live 2008 distribution. This is exactly the same distribution that runs on OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, various BSD Unix systems, and other systems.

TeX Live 2008 is a major update of TeX Live 2007. Here are some of the crucial 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.