Eager TeX users will have noticed that a few days ago TeX Live 2016 updates were frozen for ever. We now have the pretest available for TeX Live 2017. As always, using pre-release software is not without risk, but as you can install it in parallel with the older releases there is not a big problem. The LaTeX team will be updating a few things on CTAN to go into the new release, and I’ll probably mention some of that in future posts. A quick look over the changes tells us that there are minor (and perhaps not-so-minor) engine changes to explore: I’m particularly keen to try out the new XeTeX math mode approach, using HarfBuzz.