Some TeX Developments

There is a lot of work going on to develop methods for directly including mathematical meaning in documents. Projects such as STIX, XITS and Latin Modern Math are intended to provide a range of glyphs for mathematical use while retaining meaning by using the appropriate Unicode code point. Undoubtedly, this is a great idea for reusing information. However, there is always a pay-off, and in this case it is some awkwardness with document styling.

In a standard TeX math font, attributes such as bold or sans-serif can be switched on pretty easily, and also apply on an ‘ongoing’ basis. I make use of this in siunitx to allow ‘detection’ of the local font conditions. Life is much more complex with Unicode maths fonts. Instead of something like bold being a casual attribute of a symbol, it’s intrinsic to the symbol. So you can’t simply switch from on bold, or sans-serif, or anything else.

For serious mathematicians, that probably makes good sense: they make a wide and complex use of the appearance of symbols to convey meaning. On the other hand, it’s a bit awkward if you have a caption which is set in bold and want your simple piece of mathematics to match. I’m still thinking about the best way to handle this: suggestions are welcome!

The first testing builds of TeX Live 2010 are now available, which you can also read about in the TeXblog entry. I downloaded it a few days ago, currently just to my Mac (Windows testing on my system at work starts next week). There are a few changes, some of which were planned for TeX Live 2009 and did not make it. The highlights for me

• Restricted \write18 support is back. I’ve written about the issues with this before, but as I understand it these are now solved. The idea of this support is that EPS graphics can be turned into PDF graphics automatically, meaning that pdfLaTeX is much easier to use for end users with mainly EPS graphics available.
• The default PDF output is level 1.5, which means that more compression of the output is available. The amount of compression depends on the type of output (files with lots of hyperlinks seem to show the most dramatic results). I’ve been using PDF 1.5 for a while with no issues, so I hope that this is applicable to most users.
• The is a Unicode version of BibTeX included: BibTeXU. I can’t see any details of where this is coming from or the exact nature of the support: I hope to gain enlightenment at some stage. I’ll certainly be testing it.

As I’m currently testing on my Mac, I’ve installed the 64-bit binaries (these still have to be installed in addition to MacTeX at the moment). I’m seeing slightly better performance with the 64 bit binaries than the 32 bit ones, but not by much. On Windows I’m currently limited to 32 bit, so there I’ll have nothing to worry about!

So far, I’ve not had any major issues. TeX Live is very much evolution, not revolution, so that is not too much of a surprise. The team have done a good job, as usual, and I hope that others will brave the testing status of this release to help find any bugs before it’s unleashed on the TeX world at large.