Some TeX Developments

Progress toward the next stepping stone in the TeXworks schedule, release 0.4, is ongoing. To help get the new code tested for this, an experimental build has been added to the download page for users on Windows. For people on Linux, it’s usually possible to build the program from the source without too much hassle, so they can hep to test out too.

Reading through some TeX-related material today, I spotted that the very popular biblatex package has finally reached version 1. Accompanying this release is a version step for the biber BibTeX-replacement program, which reaches version 0.6. Both are now considered non-beta, and the biblatex release in particular is a big story to me. I’ll be checking on my own biblatex-related packages over the weekend and making sure that they are working with the new release, and if all goes well will move them to v1.0 as well.

A quick look through the documentation for both biblatex and biber shows that the new versions are mainly about stability. There are not a lot of changes listed from the previous testing releases: they’ve proved to be pretty stable and so the time for an official move to release status has obviously arrived.

The new TeX questions site tex.stackexchange.com has been in beta for a few months now. Today, we’ve left the beta phase and gained a new look. There seems to be a good range of people on the new site, which seems to be working well as a complement to other places to ask questions. The next thing to happen is moderator elections, which I understand will be in about a month. It will be interesting to see if the current team get kept on!