LATEX3 News
Issue 5, January 2011

Happy new year
Seasons greetings for 2011! As the previous news issue
was released late, this season’s issue will be shorter
than usual.

The LPPL is now OSI-approved
We are happy to report that earlier this year the LATEX
Project Public License (LPPL) has been approved by
the OSI as an open source licence.1 Frank Mittelbach
will be publishing further details on this news in a
retrospective on the LPPL in an upcoming TUGboat
article.

Reflections on 2010
We are pleased to see the continued development anddiscussion in the TEX world. The LATEX ecosystem
continues to see new developments and a selection ofnotable news from the second half of last year include:
June The TUG 2010 conference was held very successfully in San Francisco; videos, slides, and papers
from LATEX3 Project members are available fromour website.2
Aug. The TEX Stack Exchange3 question & answer website was created and has since grown quickly. At
time of writing, some 2800 people have asked 2600
questions with 5600 answers total, and 2200 users
are currently visiting daily.
Sept. TEX Live 2010 was released: each year the shipping date is earlier; the production process is
becoming more streamlined and we congratulate
all involved for their hard work. One of the mostnotable new components of TEX Live 2010 includes
the ‘restricted shell escape’ feature to allow, among
other things, automatic EPS figure conversion for
pdfLATEX documents.
Oct. TLContrib4 was opened by Taco Hoekwater as away to update a TEX Live installation with material that is not distributable through tlmgr itself.
Such material includes executables (e.g., new versions of LuaTEX), non-free code, or test versions ofpackages.
1 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lppl
2 http://www.latex-project.org/papers/
3 http://tex.stackexchange.com
4 http://tlcontrib.metatex.org/

Nov. Philipp Lehman released the first stable version ofbiblatex. One of the most ambitious LATEX packages in recent memory, biblatex is a highly flexible
package for managing citation cross-referencing
and bibliography typesetting. In ‘beta’ status forsome years now, reaching this point is a great
milestone.
Dec. LuaTEX 0.65. We are happy to see LuaTEX development steadily continuing. LATEX users mayuse LuaTEX with the lualatex program. Likexelatex, this allows LATEX documents to use multilingual OpenType fonts and Unicode text input.

Current progress
The expl3 programming modules continue to see revision and expansion; we have added a LuaTEX module,
but expl3 continues to support all three of pdfLATEX,XELATEX, and LuaLATEX equally.
The l3fp module for performing floating-point arithmetic has been extended and improved. Floating point
maths is important for some of the calculations required for complex box typesetting performed in thenew ‘coffins’ code. The l3coffin module has been added
based on the original xcoffins package introduced at
TUG 2010 as reported in the last news issue; this code
is now available from CTAN for testing and feedback.
We have consolidated the l3int and l3intexpr modules (which were separate for historical purposes);
all integer/count-related functions are now contained
within the ‘int’ code and have prefix \int_. Backwards
compatibility is provided for, but eventually we will
drop support for the older \intexpr_ function names.

Plans for 2011
In the following year, we plan to use the current LATEX3
infrastructure to continue work in building high-level
code for designing LATEX documents using the xtemplate package. Our first priority is to look at section
headings and document divisions, as we see this area
as one of the most difficult, design-wise, of the areas toaddress. From there we will broaden our scope to more
document elements.
We will also do some low-level work on the ‘galley’,
which is the code that LATEX3 uses to build material
for constructing pages, and we will continue to extend
expl3 into a more complete system from which we can,one day, create a pure LATEX3 format.

LATEX3 News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX3 Project Team; Copyright 2011, all rights reserved.