** New Features in MacTeX-2012 and TeX Live 2012 **

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MacTeX-2012

MacTeX-2012 installs updated versions of the GUI applications that were already in MacTeX-2011.

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, 9.05, and an updated "Convert" from ImageMagick 6.7.6-9. These packages are self-contained; MacTeX installs no libraries in /usr/local/lib.

In previous years, MacTeX was provided as a zip file. The install package was rewritten this year using Apple's modern PackageMaker, so this year's MacTeX-2012.pkg is a flat file which doesn't have to be zipped for a server or unzipped after downloading. The package is signed so it can be installed on Mountain Lion.

TeX Live 2012

MacTeX-2012 installs a completely unmodified copy of the full TeX Live 2012 distribution. This is exactly the same distribution that runs on OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, various BSD Unix systems, and other systems.

MacTeX-2012 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, Lion, or Mountain 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 modern libraries.

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 2012, see The TeX Live Guide for TeX Live 2012.

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

• pdf(La)TeX now automatically converts a requested Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file to PDF when PDF is being output. The default options are intended to eliminate any chance of hand-created PDF files being overwritten, but you can also prevent the conversion by putting \newcommand{\DoNotLoadEpstopdf}{} (or \def...) before the \documentclass declaration. Conversion also does not occur if the pst-pdf package is used. For more details, see the epstopdf package documentation (http://ctan.org/pkg/epstopdf-pkg [ctan.org]).

• A related change is that execution of a very few external commands from TeX, via the \write18 feature, is now enabled by default. These commands are repstopdf, makeindex, kpsewhich, bibtex, and bibtex8; the list is defined in texmf.cnf. Environments which must disallow all such external commands can deselect this option after installation by running
  tlmgr conf texmf shell_escape 0.

• Since 2010, the default version for PDF output is 1.5, enabling more compression. This applies to all the TeX engines when used to produce PDF and to dvipdfmx. Loading the pdf14 LaTeX package changes back to PDF 1.4, or set \pdfminorversion=4.