General ⇒ [closed] LaTeX3 News

[josephwright]

Hello all,

A quick note to say that the LaTeX3 Team have released a newsletter on what is happening with LaTeX3:

http://www.latex-project.org/l3news/

At the moment, the work is still very low-level, so for the moment it is not ready for users in general. However, progress is happening and hopefully there will be more user-orientated stuff soon-ish.

[localghost]

Many thanks for this contribution. It's good hear something new from the LaTeX3 project. For a long time it seemed that development is on hold and won't do any progress in a foreseeable span of time. I'll make this a sticky topic in hope that we can expect more news.


Best regards
Thorsten¹

[josephwright]

Things were not going anywhere for a while. However, the team seem to have some more "energy" now, and also a couple of new people (Will Robertson and me). Will and I are both very keen to get something working, and I'm hopeful that once the current low-level stuff is done we might actually move on to some user stuff!

[latexforever]

Any fresh news since February? There seems to be not much papers about LaTeX3.

[josephwright]

I post various LaTeX3-related things on my blog (www.texdev.net), which along with reading the LaTeX-L list is perhaps the best way of seeing what is happening without actually following the source commits.

[localghost]

I post various LaTeX3-related things on my blog (http://www.texdev.net), which along with reading the LaTeX-L list is perhaps the best way of seeing what is happening without actually following the source commits.

A very recommendable news source not only regarding LaTeX3.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

The LaTeX3 News Issue 07 has been released today.

Some of the topics:

• Joseph Wright has been working on adding "native" drivers for LaTeX3 to support box transformations such as rotation, clipping and scaling with dvips and xdvipdfmx drivers, and with direct PDF output.
• Bruno Le Floch has developed a TeX-based regex (regular expression) engine, which works with pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX.
• The xparse module has been overhauled and became more efficient.
• Work on the galley module continues. The galley module is for managing the vertical area into which text and other content is placed.

Stefan

[BastienBastien]

Hello,

I have a question for a master: what is the purpose of LaTeX 3 ?
I understand every software has to be improved over the time.
But, why LaTeX has to be changed that much (go from 2 to 3 is a major step as the digit shows it).

Do you think the release 2e suffers of bad developement strategy from the old time?
Is the next release better only for book writer or will it provide more features?
The language will change a little bit to be more "clear"?

I do not want make you wast your time, but if you could explain within 5 lines why LaTeX 3 then I will be happy.

Thanks and have a great day,
Bastien

[josephwright]

The kernel of LaTeX2e was frozen in 1994 and is based on code Leslie Lamport originally in the late 1980s. While the design is very good in many ways, there are limitations. Some of these show up to users (for example needing to load a package to do something as simple as create a new type of float), some if you try to do 'design' work (many layout decisions need code to change them rather than a proper designer interface), and some are at the 'programmer' level. As LaTeX2e has been around a long time, moving forward will need to solve many of the outstanding issues: simple 'patches' will not really work. That needs a new LaTeX kernel: this is the aim of LaTeX3.