** New Features in MacTeX-2022 and TeX Live 2022 **

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MacTeX-2022

Last year the programs biber and xindy were exceptions, containing only Intel code. They still ran on Arm machines using Rosetta. This year both programs are fully universal.

The program TeX Live Utility by Adam Maxwell makes heavy use of the scripting language Python. Python has been included in macOS for many years, but recently Python 2 was replaced by Python 3 and it became harder to predict which version would be in macOS. So Apple told developers that Python would eventually be removed from macOS and if they use it, they should embed a copy directly in their applications. TeX Live Utility now contains its own copy of Python. Apple indeed removed Python from the third update of Monterey, but TeX Live Utility continued to work.

TeX Live 2022

Notable changes

As always, there are pervasive updates to packages and programs. We can't list them all, but here are the major user-visible changes in the principal programs:

General

• New engine hitex, which outputs its own HINT format, designed especially for reading technical documents on mobile devices. HINT viewers for GNU/Linux, Windows, and Android are also available.
• tangle, weave: support optional third argument to specify output file.
• Knuth's program twill for making mini-indexes for original WEB programs now included.

Cross-engine extensions

In engines except for original TeX, Aleph, and hiTeX:

• New primitive \showstream to redirect \show output to a file.
• New primitives \partokenname and \partokencontext allow overriding the name of the \par token emitted at blank lines, the end of vboxes, etc.

eptex, euptex

• New primitives: \lastnodefont, \suppresslongerror, \suppressoutererror, \suppressmathparerror.
• pdfTeX extension \vadjust pre now available.

luatex

• Support structured destinations from PDF 2.0.
• PNG /Smask for PDF 2.0.
• Variable font interface for luahbtex.
• Different radical style defaults in mathdefaultsmode.
• Optionally block selected discretionary creation.
• Improvements for TrueType fonts implementation.
• More efficient \fontdimen allocation.
• Ignore paragraphs with only a local par node followed by direction synchronization nodes.

metapost

Bug fix for infinite macro expansion.

pdftex

• Support structured destinations from PDF 2.0.
• For letterspaced fonts, use explicit \fontdimen6 if specified.
• Always start a warning at the beginning of a line.
• for characters with autokern (\pdfappendkern and \pdfprependkern), still do protrusion; likewise, autokern both implicit and explicit hyphens.

ptex et al.

• Major update of pTeX to 4.0.0 to better support current LaTeX.
• New primitives \ptexlineendmode and \toucs.
• \ucs (formerly available in uptex, euptex) becomes available also in ptex, eptex.
• Distinguish 8-bit characters and Japanese characters as discussed in a TUGboat 41:3 article by Hironori Kitagawa.
• Related changes in related engines: eptex, uptex & euptex.

xetex

New wrapper scripts xetex-unsafe and xelatex-unsafe for simpler invocation of documents requiring both XeTeX and PSTricks transparency operators, which is inherently unsafe (until and unless reimplementation in Ghostscript happens). For safety, use Lua(La)TeX.

dvipdfmx

• Support for PSTricks without requiring -dNOSAFER, except for transparency.
• The -r option to set bitmap font resolution works again.

dvips

By default, do not attempt automatic media adjustment for rotated paper sizes; the new option --landscaperotate re-enables.

upmendex

• This index-sorting program is mostly upward-compatible with makeindex, with much better (Unicode-based) multilingual support. It's been in TL for some years.
• Experimental support for Arabic and Hebrew scripts; improved character classification and language support.

kpathsea

First path returned from kpsewhich -all is now the same as a regular (non-all) search.

tlmgr

• use https for mirror.ctan.org by default.
• use TEXMFROOT instead of SELFAUTOPARENT for easier relocating.

MacTeX

MacTeX and its binary folder universal-darwin require macOS 10.14 or higher (Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey). The x86_64-darwinlegacy binary folder, available only with the Unix install-tl, supports 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and newer.

Platforms

No changes to platform support for this year (2022). However, for next year's release (2023), we are planning to switch the Windows binaries from 32-bit to 64-bit. Unfortunately we cannot feasibly support both simultaneously.