General ⇒ LaTeX3 release?

[Gaussler]

I found that Google was surprisingly unhelpful about answering this question, so I decided to ask in here:

Could somebody give an estimate about when LaTeX3 is likely to be released? And how big a percentage of the entire project is done?

I understand that no one will be able to give an exact release date, but are we talking about two more years? Five years? More?

[localghost]

In this regard there is no considerable progress since you have asked nearly the same question on {TeX} SX about nine months ago. That does not mean that work on LaTeX3 is on hold.

I suggest to visit the LaTeX Project Page regularly to be informed (although the latest news are one year old now) or subscribe to the news feed.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[Gaussler]

Sure, I did, and as you can see there, the topic got closed because it was considered "too localized" in time, conflicting with the forum rules at StackExchange. Therefore, there was never an answer there to my actual question. That is indeed the reason why I am asking here.

With regards to the LaTeX Project Page, I have looked there, but did not find any clues regarding an actual release --- at least not any that I would understand without deep insight into the actual development.

[localghost]

[…] the topic got closed because it was considered "too localized" in time, conflicting with the forum rules at StackExchange. Therefore, there was never an answer there to my actual question. That is indeed the reason why I am asking here.[…]

The same status applies here, too. With the small difference that the thread is not going to be closed.

I claim that at the moment there is nobody who is involved in the development will tell you when LaTeX3 will be released.

[cgnieder]

Could somebody give an estimate about when LaTeX3 is likely to be released? And how big a percentage of the entire project is done?

Any realistic estimate is impossible. The developer team while quite active all have other jobs to do, too. Although the LaTeX3 programming layer expl3 is quite stable and already a number of packages make use of it many other ideas still have to be extended or really only are ideas as of now and no code is available. You can find many interesting post on TeX.sx such as this one. Personally I don't think that in the next ten years we will get a LaTeX3 format other than for testing purposes. But as I said: a realistic estimate is impossible.

If you're interested you can

1. regularly check the news
2. follow the mailing list. You can join this list, which is intended solely for discussing ideas and concepts for future versions of LaTeX, by sending mail to listserv@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE containing the line
   SUBSCRIBE LATEX-L Your Name
3. carefully read the posts tagged {latex3} on TeX.sx. Most if not all of the LaTeX3 team are active on the site.

Regards

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Once a release or prerelease is announced, you will find it here in LaTeX3 News, you will see it on our front page, in the TeX community aggregator, in my blog and many places, there would be a good noise.

However, I'm sure it will happen parallel to the LaTeX development. Already now there are fundamental parts of LaTeX3 available.

What do you expect of LaTeX3? Are you waiting for specific features or are you generally interested in progress?

Stefan

[Gaussler]

@cgnieder, thanks for the advice, I'll certainly use it!

@Stefan, nothing in particular, I'm just looking forward to the overall L3 software. I recently started looking into TeX programming, but I quickly started to long for a more streamlined system. That's why I started looking into L3 and got curious about how far away it is.