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** New Features in MacTeX-2011 and TeX Live 2011 **


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MacTeX-2011

MacTeX-2011 installs updated versions of the GUI applications that were already in MacTeX-2010.

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.

MacTeX installs the latest version of Ghostscript, 9.02, and an updated "Convert" from ImageMagick 6.6.9-3. These packages are self-contained; MacTeX installs no libraries in /usr/local/lib.

TeX Live 2011

MacTeX-2011 installs a completely unmodified copy of the full TeX Live 2011 distribution. This is exactly the same distribution that runs on OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, various BSD Unix systems, and other systems.

MacTeX-2011 contains two binary directories. The first, universal-darwin, contains 32 bit binaries for both Intel and PowerPC processors; these run on all Macs which have OS X 10.5 or later. The second, x86_64-darwin, contains 64 bit Intel binaries compiled on Snow Leopard; these programs run only on Intel machines which are 64 bit capable and are running Snow Leopard or Lion. Our tests show that the 32 bit binaries run very fast on 64 bit machines, so most users won't notice the difference between these two sets of binaries. Since the 32 bit binaries run fine on Leopard, we had the luxury of compiling 64 bit binaries only for Snow Leopard, where we could use Apple's very latest libraries.

The TeX Distribution Preference Pane has been revised for 2011. It now shows only one distribution, TeXLive-2011. A pull down menu appears for users whose machines can run both 32 and 64 bit binaries, allowing them to choose the active binaries. The pane still shows two distributions for 2010, TeXLive-2010 and TeXLive-2010-64; TeXLive-2010-64 was only installed on machines running Snow Leopard.

Two programs in x86_64-darwin are still 32 bit versions: xetex and xdv2pdf. That is because the Mac versions of these programs use a deprecated font library which Apple did not port to 64 bits.

For new features in TeX Live 2011, see The TeX Live Guide for TeX Live 2011.

We'd like to call attention to three changes in TeX Live 2010 which remain important for TeX Live 2011: